Community Internet secures connectivity for UK SMEs through StoneGate
Community Internet (CI) is a rapidly growing company that has earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the UK’s leading business Internet service providers. By partnering with Stonesoft, CI has incorporated powerful and cost-effective security, redundancy and business continuity features into the flexible bespoke solutions it designs for its customers.
CI specialises in delivering an extensive range of remote access and virtual private networking (VPN) solutions to help small-to-medium sized businesses provide high performance communication links between headquarters, branch offices, home workers and mobile workers, adding strength and redundancy to existing IT and security capabilities. Typical clients are UK-based organisations with between 100 and 1000 employees and expanding connectivity requirements. These might be centralised businesses that are bandwidth hungry such as hi-tech, printing or design companies, or dispersed organisations that need to connect multiple sites and individuals such as construction, law, or emergency services.
With more and more of its customers calling for wholesale infrastructure assignments, CI was alarmed to discover just how expensive, complex and ineffective many of the failover solutions on the market today really are. It wasn’t until it took a closer look at the marketplace in an
effort to uncover a solution that would allow it to plan customer WAN solutions with the resilience necessary for modern business that it discovered StoneGate from Stonesoft.
“When I first encountered StoneGate I was a bit sceptical that it could carry out all of its claimed functionality, but after testing it proved to be a flexible and reliable engine,” said Andy Conway, CI’s professional services director. “Our customers are looking for more than just an MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) Wide Area Network; they need solutions that incorporate security, multi-link and the ability to deliver off-net via separate providers using technologies such as 3G and satellite. StoneGate’s ability to use a variety of encrypted VPN technologies allows us to deliver over all of these links while managing it all from a single central management station.”
CI believes that IT security and resilience are of paramount concern when designing WAN environments for its customers. These SMEs simply want to own wide-area-networks that just work all day every day, allow the ensured and timely delivery of data to all parties necessary and are flexible enough to embrace new technologies and standards as they emerge. StoneGate Multi-Link is a unified, centrally managed system that combines deep network security and assured end-to-end availability.
StoneGate's Multi-Link technology overcomes a number of availability and latency issues associated with the Internet. Traditionally, connections provided by ISPs have been a single point of failure. In order to eliminate this risk, IT managers have had to resort to very complicated and costly solutions such as redundant routers and switches, routing protocols such as BGP and HSRP, and peering arrangements between ISPs. StoneGate's Multi-Link Technology and ISP Multi-homing techniques solve this problem by providing CI customers with highly available ISP connectivity in a simple, straightforward and cost-effective manner. If one link fails, traffic is automatically failed-over to a backup connection or connections. Multi-Link supports many types of Internet links, including ISDN, DSL, leased lines, modem connection and even satellite. With Multi-Link, IT heads at CI’s SME customer sites can guarantee they always have Internet connectivity on tap when it is needed.
StoneGate uses a combination of layered architecture and central monitoring to create security control and ensure fast response times to security breaches and network disturbances. Load-balancing features for gateways and web servers increase performance and eliminate downtime. In this way StoneGate represents a welcome alternative to more costly point-to-point MPLS connections, while providing CI’s SME customers with the flexibility to spread their connectivity bases and ensure optimal Internet connectivity at highly competitive prices. It ensures always-on Internet connectivity thanks to patented load-sharing functionality, and can integrate with a variety of Internet or enterprise-wide connections to ensure high availability, the fastest connection possible and significant savings. SMEs with branch offices or a mobile/distributed workforce connected via VPN connections can also use StoneGate Multi-Link as an ideal solution to ensure that data flows as it should, speedily and securely.
CI has been impressed by StoneGate’s ease of use, technical complexity and scope, while CI customers were quick to understand the benefits StoneGate was able to deliver. Conway explained: “The effects of the infrastructure and its flexibility were immediately felt and we were able to deploy wide area networks quickly and without fuss. We are able to pro-actively monitor client usage and have had a couple of instances where we have installed StoneGate into a new site and immediately discovered that some customer machines are infected with viruses or worms and are handling suspect traffic.
“Generally when we unpack a StoneGate the customer’s reaction is: “Is that it? It’s very small!” But once installed they quickly see the benefits. Our customers generally don’t have too much to do with StoneGate themselves, but recognise that we are able to respond to requests for change positively and quickly”.
Community Internet believes that many of its SME customers were struggling with the challenge of protecting the perimeter of their network whilst trying to concentrate on their core business, and move projects forward at the same time. By partnering with Stonesoft, CI can now remove this burden efficiently and economically. The Stonesoft StoneGate Platform is now available to all Community Internet customers, providing further choice, flexibility, productivity and security across this innovative business ISP’s remote internet access and VPN solutions.
For further information please contact:
Glyn Miles or Jacqui Nicholls
Tel: 01865 856000, email:info@community.net.uk
Web: www.community.net.uk