Chris MurchisonInfrastructure EngineerGibraltarhttp://www.victorchandler.com/
Originally established in 1946, Victor Chandler is now one of the leading betting and gaming companies in the world, with over half a million customers in over 160 different countries. The company offers a wide variety of online betting platforms which include a number of extremely successful casino and poker sites, and two dedicated football betting websites, offering odds on football in six different languages. Headquartered in Gibraltar with operations in the UK, Europe and the Far East, Victor Chandler International employs more than 400 people and has a turnover in excess of £1billion.
Infrastructure Engineer Chris Murchison needed a new web filtering system to safeguard and audit the company's web usage. Their previous web security solution had been implemented a number of years ago and was no longer supported by vendor Symantec, who were unable to offer an alternative. Chris was specifically looking for an easy to manage solution with highly granular reporting capabilities that would integrate well with existing systems, without using up valuable network resources. Chris also had a future requirement for IM filtering as he was due to implement a messaging system for the company's 400 employee base in the near future.
Chris decided to evaluate Guardian following his personal experience of the Open Source firewall, Smoothwall Express. After installing Guardian on test hardware, Chris was pleased to discover that it had more features than he was expecting for the price (including full support for Instant Messaging) and operated much more efficiently than the other products they trialled. Visibility of internet use was dramatically improved, with staff able to access Guardian's granular reports with ease. Chris found the system easy to configure and maintain, describing AD integration as 'flawless'.
Since installation, Guardian has performed reliably, with its built-in AV providing valuable protection against web-based threats. Chris also says he has been very impressed with the prompt and professional level of service and support he has received.
We were very impressed with Guardian's feature set, lightweight footprint and efficient resource usage compared to the other products we tested. We needed an efficient web filtering/auditing solution that would integrate well with Active Directory- Smoothwall did this with ease
Guardian has allowed us to provide a faster and more reliable web filtering service with minimal fuss. The cost compared to other products in the same category was also very reasonable for the services delivered
Since team managers and department heads had a need to run their own reports against staff web usage it was vital that a comprehensive and easy to use reporting system was present on the product. Guardian's reporting templates provided this facility well. We found Smoothwall's interface to be intuitive and easy to administrate. This means our Service Desk admin team would have no problems administering the filters for unblocks. False positives are also very low compared to our previous product and our users appreciate that since it improves their browsing experience
One of the things I personally liked about the system was the ability to restore configurations from backups. In simulated hardware failure we tested a rebuild on a new server with a restored configuration off a remote backup server and had the new server up and running in a matter of minutes
A key benefit for the business is knowing we have a reliable additional layer of security that will protect the companies intellectual data from web based viruses and other such malware
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