Infotech Lead America: Network security provider Fortinet says Eurosport, a TV sport network, has deployed FortiGate network security appliances.
Eurosport has replaced Check Point and Juniper firewalls, said Fortinet in a statement.
FortiGate network security appliances will enable the largest TV sport network in Europe to protect its 1,000 employees across 17 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
As part of the agreement, Eurosport, which broadcasts in 20 languages and reaches 130 million homes across 54 countries, also deployed Fortinet’s FortiAP wireless access points to provide secure Wi-Fi access to its employees.
Worldwide, network security appliance and software revenue grew 10 percent in 2012 to $6.3 billion, and is up 7 percent from the year-ago 4th quarter, at $1.7 billion.
Recently, Infonetics said network security companies like Palo Alto, Fortinet, Sourcefire, and Dell SonicWALL are challenging the market dominance of Cisco, Check Point, and Juniper.
Integrated security appliances have gained share every quarter since Q4 2011. In 2012, Cisco, Check Point, Juniper, McAfee, and Fortinet led the network security market, though Infonetics expects possible share changes in 2013.
Recently, Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research, said: “Challengers like Palo Alto, Fortinet, Sourcefire, and Dell SonicWALL will continue to make life interesting for Cisco, Check Point, and Juniper in 2013. When they find success, it will be because they exploit dis-satisfaction with the pricing, efficacy, performance, and feature breadth of the products from the top 3 vendors.”
In 2012, Eurosport Group decided to replace its existing Check Point and Juniper firewalls with a solution that could integrate firewall, SSL VPN and offer more flexibility in terms of management and administration.
Eurosport is present in 17 countries but don’t have technical resources available in each location. This is why its priority was ease of administration and management. Fortinet was the only vendor to fully meet its requirements thanks to its ability to configure and update the device with a simple USB key.
Thierry Landeau, network and security project manager at Eurosport, said: “To configure the appliances located in Tokyo for instance, we emailed the setup file and firmware that we wanted to integrate in the devices, and our sales team in the Tokyo agency transferred those files onto a USB stick that they connected to the Fortinet appliance before turning it on. Five minutes later, the FortiGate device was operational.”
Due to high bandwidth needs, three Fortinet clusters were deployed at Eurosport’s headquarters in France: The first cluster included two FortiGate-1000C appliances, and the other two clusters consisted of two FortiGate-200B appliances.
In addition, fifteen FortiGate-80C clusters were deployed in agencies located in: the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, UAE, Japan and Hong Kong. And, to address the bandwidth requirements of the larger offices counting around fifty employees, four FortiGate-110C clusters were deployed in the agencies located in the UK, Germany and Sweden.
With the increasing use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets on its corporate network, Eurosport Group decided to provide secure wireless Internet access to its employees and, in particular, to its sales team. For this, Eurosport opted for Fortinet rather than a wireless network security specialist, such as Aruba Networks.
Pascal Delorme, system, network and telecoms manager at Eurosport, said: “Since Fortinet’s FortiGate appliances are equipped with wireless controllers, we decided it made logical sense to choose Fortinet’s FortiAP wireless access points in order standardize on vendors at Eurosport and avoid multiple licenses and administration.”
To date, 23 FortiAP-220B wireless access points have been deployed across the different agencies. Eurosport employee who usually connects to Wi-Fi in the Paris office, can log into any other agency within the group with the same SSID and password.
Nicolas Perrault, network and security engineer at Eurosport, said: “Fortinet’s FortiAPs address our requirements in terms of mobility optimization as they have allowed us to standardize on Wi-Fi, that is to say, assign the same name and the same SSID to each user across all agencies.”
Ambika K
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