Stonesoft Assures Secure Information Flow for Istituto Superiore di Sanità
Stonesoft’s StoneGate solution for Network Security has been selected by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Italian Health Institute) to create a security architecture able to offer the highest protection at the lowest management costs, maximum ROI and a punctual security governance.
Istituto superiore di Sanità
Istituto Superiore di Sanità, the main technical-scientific body of Servizio Sanitario Nazionale (Italian Health Service), is a public institution for research and consultancy, education and control applied to public health’s protection. Istituto Superiore di Sanità has been operating for over 70 years and is based in Rome.The Health Institute carries on research and scientific studies directly and in cooperation with the Italian Health Service’s organizations, besides promoting advanced clinical experimentations and technological developments together with hospitals and clinics. Among the several activities run by the Institute is the cooperation with the Italian Minister of Health for developing and applying of health and scientific programmes.
The Health Institute also organizes education and update activities in the public health area, addressing the National Health Service’s needs, by experimenting innovative methodologies above all in the field of remote training, using a dedicated web platform. It organizes congresses, conferences, workshops and seminars about key topics of uppermost importance for public health, connected to the institutional and research activities run by the Health Institute and addressed to a broad national and international audience.
The problem
Being a research Institute and having the need to treat extremely sensitive and private information and data, the Health Institute must pay a particularly high attention to security - both physical and logic - and consequently needs a punctual governance both of the methods and the information monitoring and usage.- In particular, there were 4 objectives that brought the Health Institute to consider, and eventually chose, Stonesoft’s StoneGate solution:
- Reaching a complete security governance at the lowest management costs (or TCA, Total Cost of Administration).
- Equipping with an effective, scalable and highly reliable logic protection system.
- Implementing a load balancing architecture on protected servers.
- Improving the balancing of Internet connectivity by using different carriers, in a context of business continuity.
The solution
The Health Institute found the ideal solution to all its problems in Stonesoft's StoneGate platform, that has been implemented as an architecture with perimetral protection operating nodes, VPN and protection from logic intrusion on general purpose Intel hardware platform; all managed and maintained through StoneGate Management Center.This project comes from the need to adapt the logic protection levels according to functions, thus reducing management costs and impact on resources.”
Claudio Di Benedetto, Technology Executive of the Istituto
Superiore di Sanità.
With Stonesoft's solution we obtained an optimization of the perimetral protection and intrusion detection, thanks to an high focus on security governance and on the possibility to use information."
StoneGate is a logical protection solution fully scalable, ensuring security and high availability of networks for business-critical applications. Thanks to the integrated Multi-Link technology, StoneGate provides secure connections and load balancing, offering in a single solution advanced security, clustering features, high throughput (over 4 Gbps) and effective management.
The system implemented by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità allows for an effective protection of different network segments and the session balancing among different servers, thus maximizing the use of services with an optimal logical protection level. Firewall architectures have been put in high availability with load balancing, with a cluster without passive components in hot-standby, which means a low cost of administration and ownership.
“ The centralized administration system, being part of the Stonesoft Network Security Architecture, allows the Istituto Superiore di Sanità to reduce the TCA (Total Cost of Administration) in administering and maintaining the system. The combination of firewall, VPN and IPS for the Intrusion Protection, also managed by the same administration system, allows for the expansion of the logical protection system without modifying the usual management,” explained Emilio Turani, Country Manager Stonesoft Italia.
The results
StoneGate allowed us to reach high reliability and security standards, minimizing the impact on the organizational structure and strengthening performances and flexibility.”
Eugenio Carrani, Technical Co-operator Enti di Ricerca of the Istituto Superiore
di Sanità.
Thanks to Stonesoft’s StoneGate technology, its ability to integrate with the existing systems and its load balancing capabilities, we reached one of our primary objectives, that is minimizing the impact of the introduction of the security technology on the whole organization. Moreover, the solution provided by Stonesoft allowed to obtain a saving on upgrade costs: the software integrated in the solution, in fact, allows for remote updates with a procedure that requires just 5 minutes.”
Thanks to the compatibility with the Intel server, in case a firewall cluster node breaks down, StoneGate can restart in few minutes. It is also possible to install one more Intel server inside the cluster in order to double the high availability. Moreover, StoneGate is scalable both horizontally – in terms of numbers of cluster nodes – and vertically, with the possibility to add more network cards without changing the existing hardware, according to the scalability limits of the server itself.
The management is thus separated, that is the administration system and the firewall system are not on the same machine, so that a possible downtime of the firewall does not imply the loss of configuration information and the management
system downtime does not impact the firewalling service.
Stonesoft worked strictly together with the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in order to find a solution founded on Stonesoft architectures’ main benefits, and supported the customer during the whole testing process: from the product examination through the assistance to minimize time for evaluating the impact and solution study.
" Working with the customer is an added value on which Stonesoft Italy market strategy is based”, commented Emilio Turani.
The StoneGate Platform
StoneGate security and business continuity platform integrates Stonesoft’s firewall, VPN and IPS technologies with key components to ensure the highest network and Internet availability. This solution has been designed to protect business resources through different security levels, and detect and react to threats by ensuring at the same time a continuous availability thanks to StoneGate’s native clustering features. Moreover, Stonesoft’s patented Multi-Link technology allows for load balancing and high availability also in connections from and to Internet, and between VPNs. By offering a global distributed management through a single centralized management server, StoneGate allows organizations to reduce costs and simplify their security and network infrastructure management.About Stonesoft
Stonesoft Corporation is an innovative provider of integrated network security and business continuity. Stonesoft is a global company focused on enterprise level customers requiring advanced network security and always-on business connectivity with low TCO, best price-to-performance ratio, and highest ROI. StoneGate™ Security Platform unifies firewall, VPN and IPS, blending network security, end-to-end availability and award-winning load balancing into a unified and centrally managed systemfor distributed enterprises. Founded in 1990, Stonesoft Corporation has corporate headquarters in Helsinki, Finland and Americas headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information, visit www.stonesoft.com.