STI Customer Success Story

Customer Background

• STI stands for Systems Technology Institute, which is one of the biggest and well-known college and has over 70 campuses over Philippines.
• At year 2017, STI decided to refresh its entire network infra and connectivity to replace with the previous setup, which is PfSense software firewall in schools and Cyberoam UTM in Headquarter datacenter. Management issue, security issue and controllability issue are the triggers that force STI to change the way they were doing.

Business Pain-Points 

• Due to weak controllability of PfSense, IT received many complains about how productivity affected by the slowness of the applications that relies on the internet speed such as email, school websites, e-learning. Some APP is out of control such as proxy software, video in social media. The unblocked application consumed the bandwidth. Same thing happens in branch campus.
• Monitoring the network security as a whole as well as the how the utilization of the bandwidth is difficult since PfSense cannot be managed centrally. Maintaining software-based firewall is complex also due to command line.
• Ransomware, webpage defacement and hosts infected by malware sending huge packet causing slowness of internet, business interruption. Traditional UTM and software-based firewall aren't capable to track attack and virus in advance. Firewall security log is complex to analysis as well as branch school security is also a huge challenge.

Executive Summary

• Customer: STI
• Industry: Education
• Location: Philippines

Challenges

• Weak controllability of firewall
• Monitoring network security as a whole is difficult
• Traditional UTM and software-based firewall aren’t capable to track attack in advance

Sangfor Solutions

• Sangfor NGAF * 40 units, Sangfor BBC, Sangfor Security Butler

Sangfor Solution

• Sangfor NGAF replace with Cyberoam UTM and PfSense, which provide comprehensive protection not only IPS, virus inspection, sandboxing but also proactive vulnerability scanning and advanced persistent threat protection.
• Sangfor BBC platform that provides central management and monitoring of campus firewall and pushing down configuration to each firewall.
• Sangfor Security Butler gather security logs from each firewall, centrally and automatically analysis them to provide an omniscient result.

Values

• Bandwidth investment is reduced by 30% yearly. Since NGAF is more capable to block bandwidth-consuming APP as well as BBC centrally setup policy so that branch firewall policy is strictly deny recreational application instead that decided by branch IT stuff.
• Manpower investment is reduced by 40%. STI used to position one IT admin and one IT support in each school. With the help of central management, most of management task could be easily done by HO IT, after Sangfor solution deployed, STI only keep one IT support in each school.
• Hidden virus and malware is disclosed by Sangfor Security Butler. With the analysis of Sangfor Security Team, the said virus had already infected STI over half year and jumped from one campus to other three campus. Butler centrally analysis the attack and infection track and disclose the virus source. STI receives security event report and anti-malware tools to eliminate the hidden virus.