Momentum gains momentum with network management

Momentum Energy is a rapidly growing company that specialises in the energy needs of businesses. “In our business, maintaining consistently high levels of service is of paramount importance,” said David Vo, IT Manager, Momentum Energy. “We are entrusted by our customers to deliver reliable electricity and energy services for their businesses. That’s a big responsibility to have and a lot of it rests on having the right tools and resources internally that ensures our servers, networks, CRMs and financial systems are operating at their optimum.”

Apart from protecting Momentum Energy’s IT infrastructure and IP assets, Vo has to provide the management and human resources teams with the means to manage internet and online content usage by Momentum’s employees.

“It’s a very grey area, as I’m sure a lot of IT Managers will attest. How do you ensure that employees maintain a high level of productivity at work? And how do you ensure that employees in widely differing roles in the organisation all have appropriate levels of access according to their job function?” Vo asked.

“Not to mention the almost mandatory requirement for firewall, antivirus, antispam and VPN access, among other things. The challenge for us was finding a cost-effective and reliable solution that fulfilled the above requirements, not to mention a level of servicing that was up to our standards,” Vo added.

To help overcome these challenges, Momentum Energy sought out Blue Reef, a pioneer of role-based, access control and network enforcement appliances. The Blue Reef Sonar solution provided Momentum Energy with the complete management of its networks, from firewall to granular access control down to the level of a website’s sub-domain. The Sonar solution also facilitated detailed reports to be generated, so that Vo could work closely with human resources to identify and manage non-business critical usage of websites such as Facebook, YouTube as well as illegal file-sharing sites and forums.

The Sonar implementation provided benefits for Momentum Energy right from the beginning.

“We did an ROI analysis and decided that the initial investment was worthwhile, considering the robustness of Sonar’s firewall, antivirus and antispam features - not to mention the intangible but crucial benefit for us in having effective means to manage employee productivity,” said Vo.

“We’ve also found Sonar to be scalable and flexible. The solution has easily dealt with the growth in user hardware and backend infrastructure. It’s also cross-platform capable, meaning that we can easily manage a mix of Windows and Apple machines if needed. As a result, we now have Sonar appliances running at head office as well as at our disaster recovery centre.”