ENN Group's manager of the IT information security department, Xiao Peng has been sleeping soundly ever since his organization reinforced its backend system.
Headquartered in the Langfang Economic and Technological Development Zone in the Hebei Province of China, ENN Group specializes in the production and application development of clean energy. Its business projects include: gas for urban areas, energy equipment, biochemical products, as well as energy chemical engineering.
Currently ENN Group has a workforce of 23,000 with total assets exceeding RMB20 billion. ENN has 100 subsidiaries, holding companies, and offices in over 80 cities across China and in overseas markets including the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia.
Relying on an outdated firewall previously, ENN was unable to effectively detect and block viruses and other attacks before they spread into the ENN network.
Xiao was painfully aware that with the growth in Internet traffic, the risk of network security breaches had soared and compromised PCs could easily spread attacks to other systems and cause far-reaching damage.
In the previous IT infrastructure, Xiao was concerned with a single point of failure.
"With only one firewall, if it were to break down, we would not have an efficient way to regain secure access to the Internet and VPN."
Managing stand-alone firewalls was time consuming and prone to errors, and analyzing multiple firewall logs was difficult, he recalled.
To make matters worse, VPN access and performance were inconsistent, said Xiao.
"ENN was using multiple ISPs, and our VPN clients could not select the optimum link without manual intervention."
Reinforcing the backend
In August 2007, ENN decided to reinforce its backend system. The first stage of the implementation ended in December 2007. The final stage ended in October last year.
"We wanted a solution that would incorporate redundancy for uninterrupted security and high availability for our VPN access."
Centralized management of appliances for easy configuration and deployment of policy updates was on his list too.
Xiao also wanted the solution to be able to accommodate ENN's security needs over the next few years.
Compatibility with its existing security infrastructure and cost efficiency were features the organization considered as well.
The organization eventually decided on Check Point's security appliances, event analysis and centralized management solutions to secure its headquarters and branch offices.