Posturite

Case Study

Peter Burnett
Network Infrastucture Manager
East Sussex

http://www.posturite.co.uk/

The Background

Posturite is Britain's leading provider of ergonomic solutions for the workplace. It dominates the UK ergonomic office furniture and accessories market with a 60% share of curative sales. The company also operates three other specialist divisions: WorkRite, which provides health and safety training and e-learning solutions; Office Environments which offers creative interior design and planning solutions for new and refurbished offices; and MediRite which sells first aid and medical supplies and training.

What was the problem that needed to be solved, that required you to look for a new system?

Posturite needed a system that would:
1. Protect users from Virus & Malware from using the web for research purposes
2. Reduce our bandwidth by stopping the downloading of adverts that were not necessary
3. Reduce our bandwidth by preventing the use of 'time wasting applications'
4. Reduce and control the email SPAM that users were dealing with
5. Provide an edge endpoint for our remote workers to create an SSL/VPN or IPSec VPN onto so that they appear almost as part of the corporate LAN
6. Increase the productivity by preventing the use of social networking, sports and auction sites
7. Using the multi-homed features and multiple interfaces, we can now hide and protect our edge facing web and data servers (Posturite, MediRite, Office-Environments and WorkRite Web Sites) in such a fashion that only whose who should have access, will have access
8. Provides Intrusion Detection & Prevention Systems (IDS and IPS) to protect corporate data leakage
9. Will play a major part in the companies forthcoming ISO 27001 accreditation
10. Is playing a major part in the companies PCI-DSS compliancy program
11. High Availability through the failover mechanisms

Why did you choose Smoothwall?

Already a user of Smoothwall 3 and 4 but had originally experimented with the Smoothwall Express versions. Posturite had had a major infrastructure update when we relocated the Head Office and we needed a system that would provide a move diverse and configurable environment to meet the forthcoming infrastructure challenges. The natural progression from Smoothwall 4 was to the UTM-1000. It is simple to install, flexible in what it does, easy to understand its administration and is a lot cheaper than its' competitors. We also wanted a system that was supported in the UK.

What has your Smoothwall product enabled you to do?

The UTM-1000 has reduced the SPAM / UCE hitting our internal mail server by an immeasurable amount, rather than thousands of spam emails a day hitting the internal email server, only 100's now and this is a measurable cost saving in users time. We can now enforce the companies Acceptable Use Policies (AUP) with the UTM-1000. Additionally, the UTM-1000 provides the first line of defence in anti-Viral and Malware detection / Prevention in a 3 line deep system.

Did we replace a solution from another company? Or who did we compete with?

Smoothwall 3 was our first foray into a firewall device as the company had no previous firewall devices at the time (2003). Moving onwards to Smoothwall 4 and eventually towards the UTM-1000 was a natural progression.

Are you dealing directly with Smoothwall or through one of our Partners?

Direct with Smoothwall.

Do you have any comments about the quality of service you received from Smoothwall or our Partners?

Support from Smoothwall is second to none, knowledgeable experts on the product and have been known to operate outside business hours in testing and upgrades to meet the business requirements when this can not be performed within a 9-5 day.

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