About MOSTI
The Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation (MOSTI) is a leading Malaysian ministry focused on research and development, combined with commercialization and innovation, that will lead to economic growth, technological advancement, environmental sustainability, and the building of a stronger community within the Malaysian landscape.
The government branch is responsible for enhancing Malaysia's Science, Technology, Innovation, and Economics (STIE) and providing services to address national issues through scientific approaches, the latest technology, and human capital development. This aims to increase the country’s national competitiveness in the global market while maintaining a commitment towards environmental health and the public’s common well-being.
Business Pain-Points
The Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation dedicated a lot of energy to the management of endpoints, patching, database updates, and scanning in an effort to monopolize the time of IT administrators.
The department was also concerned with endpoint administration and the internal traffic generated from the endpoints. Most command-and-control traffic was initialized from the endpoints yet the antivirus in place failed to detect anything - creating a contradiction between the endpoints and the gateway firewall. Most antiviruses also have outdated databases of threat signatures which makes them unable to detect new virus variants.
Additionally, the ministry feared that a ransomware attack would affect its operations and reputation in the public eye and sought a solution that could mitigate the risks of that eventuality.
The branch also found it difficult to manage its thousands of endpoints - including multiple working PCs and various servers which posed a threat to the network’s safety. The previous solution implemented did not have a centralized overview of the real-time network conditions - such as when their OS was fully patched – and required the scanning of each endpoint individually, which was slow and inefficient.
Finally, the ministry used multiple physical servers and a few SAN storage appliances however, the servers were archaic – some in operation for over 10 years – and produced ineffective and limited performance capabilities with little or no room for expansion once fully used.
The ministry tried to leverage more than one virtualization solution from other vendors – which resulted in the tedious task of managing and maintaining multiple platforms while using different licenses, and the inability to update the virtual software to newer versions due to the establishment’s outdated hardware. The ministry had no alternative but to search for a more efficient solution for its virtualization needs.
Sangfor’s Solution for MOSTI
Sangfor proposed the Next Generation Firewall (NGAF) in correlation with the Endpoint Secure platform to enhance the ministry’s network defense. Endpoint Secure is responsible for protecting all endpoints against cyber threats, while giving the IT administrators the ability to do vulnerability patching and other tasks that were previously occupying the administrator’s time and energy. The Next Generation Firewall (NGAF) stops command-and-control traffic while performing remote scanning and file quarantining to protect the network from infection.
Additionally, the Sangfor Endpoint Secure platform includes a centralized management platform that gives its IT administrators an overview of their entire endpoint condition – performing remote scanning of all the endpoints and isolating malicious files from the Next Generation Firewall (NGAF) or Endpoint Secure manager - all while creating policies to prevent endpoints from communicating with critical servers. The Endpoint Secure platform also updates its database automatically – enhancing its ability to identify new threats.
The integration of Sangfor’s Next Generation Firewall (NGAF) and Endpoint Secure also provides effective ransomware protection for the ministry. If even one endpoint is infected by ransomware, Sangfor’s Endpoint Secure will use its micro-segmentation feature to prevent the ransomware from spreading internally combined with its Zero-File Infection function, which uses dummy files as bait to kill the ransomware encryption process immediately when triggered.
Finally, the Sangfor Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) helped the ministry to drastically reduce its server application usage into a conveniently small cluster of nodes. Consolidating compute, network, and storage - as well as backup and security virtualization into a single solution. The Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) features an interesting and user-friendly management console for the ministry to make use of.
The ministry also took to the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure’s flexibility and expansion capabilities – allowing the branch to increase its RAM and storage resources as required without any additional licensing charges.
End-User Experience
Wan Mohd Akmal Wan Mohammad Nor is the Senior Assistant Secretary in charge of the data center at the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation and has attested that Sangfor’s Hyper-Converged Infrastructure holds a stellar reputation in governing industries - inspiring confidence in Sangfor Technologies to provide elevated and effective IT solutions.
Sangfor ensures that support and service are the most crucial aspects of implementing a functional IT infrastructure and the ministry agrees, stating that Sangfor’s multi-lingual local call center allowed it to get 24/7 remote support and direct local onsite support.
The ministry was also very candid in approaching Sangfor to launch any system on the cloud as the government moves towards cloud transformation and once Sangfor is appointed as one of the Cloud Service Providers of choice for government sectors. Watch the interview video to learn more.