Transcript
Case study
Greek communications company minimises network change risk Distinctive Software’s firewall automation solution underpinned by HP Software Industry Telecommunications Objective Reduce time taken to make changes and gain better control of new firewall configurations Approach Decided that automation was the key and investigated various software solutions on the market IT matters • Saves 40 man hours a day in engineers time • Handles and tracks large configuration changes on the firewall • Relieves network pressure by reducing needless re-configurations Business matters • Saves €100,000 a year by automating repetitive tasks • Generates vital compliance reports for audit • Ensures that firewalls keep pace with shifts in security environment and growing user needs
“HP Network Automation was the only software that was capable of handling the large configuration files from the customer infrastructure.” – Spyros Agathos, managing director, Distinctive Software Solutions
Automation is the key With 500 network elements and 40 firewall devices, engineers at a leading Greek communications company found it very time consuming to implement and track firewall configuration changes. To cope with up to 15 change requests a day, it implemented Distinctive Software Solutions’ Firewall Automation Management and Provisioning software, based on HP Network Automation and HP Network Node Manager i.
Case study | Distinctive Software Solutions
Challenge
They were facing multiple work orders with up to 15 change requests a day and each work order included 70 to 100 Access The headache of managing change Control List (ACL) requests. With the Firewalls are a company’s first line of existing size of the firewall configuration protection against network security breaches. it was proving impossible to validate They control incoming and outgoing network the ACL and furthermore completion traffic based on applied rule sets. But with times on work orders were unacceptable. growing companies, it is inevitable that It was vital for them to achieve better those rules will change to reflect shifts in the security environment or increasing user needs. management of these complex tasks. When firewall configurations are changed it is vital that those changes are managed in a controlled way and in line with previously agreed policies. Clear audit trails are necessary to show who made what changes, when and why. Handling daily requests for new access or changes to access rules is a time consuming task and when done manually, it can also be error prone. Additionally, effective reporting is difficult and compliance is complicated to manage. Large configuration creation on multiple devices daily was very time consuming for one of the leading communications companies in Greece. To succeed in its highly competitive industry, the operator has to constantly create new services and decommission old ones. This affects network security and for every project it was taking the company’s engineers up to half a day to discover and manually open communication paths across the network.
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Solution Minimising risk of change Automation was the key and having unsuccessfully tried other vendors, the operator turned to HP Partner Distinctive Software Solutions who it had previously employed on various security projects. Athens-based Distinctive Software Solutions designs and delivers unique software based on HP Software products. The solution it proposed was Firewall Automation Management and Provisioning which uses HP Network Automation and HP Network Node Manager i. Firewall Automation Management and Provisioning from Distinctive Software Solutions is designed to minimise the risk of network changes by automating processes and keeping audit trails. It reduces risk by enabling compliance reports to be easily generated and reduces workloads by standardising the change process.
Case study | Distinctive Software Solutions
Customer solution at a glance Software • HP Network Automation • HP Network Node Manager i • Firewall Automation Management and Provisioning
HP Automation gathers all the relevant network information. HP Network Automation then manages the complete operational lifecycle of these devices from provisioning to policy-based change management, compliance and security administration. Firewall Automation Management and Provisioning from Distinctive Software Solutions provides a link between the network and HP Network Automation. Its code creates intelligence from communication requests and enables them to talk with the HP Network Automation Application Program Interface to automate processes. “The whole functionality around the firewall automation and provisioning was developed by us. The complete solution needs both HP Network Automation and our Firewall Automation Management and Provisioning from Distinctive Software Solutions code,” says managing director of Distinctive Software Solutions, Spyros Agathos. “We have created the intelligence the customer needed to accomplish daily tasks in the network security devices.”
Our solution partner
“Firewall automation has reduced strain on the network security devices because engineers can now verify through an automated process for configuration reusability, rather than just always adding new configuration lines. The company can also track any changes and generate comprehensive configuration and backup reports for audit purposes.”
Benefits Savings in time and money Introducing firewall automation with the additional benefits of HP Network Automation has reduced workloads, resulting in savings of approximately €100,000 a year. Previously, engineers needed hours to deal with even the simplest change request. By employing the new service solution multiple work orders can run in parallel with each one accomplished in seconds. With ten to 15 requests we estimate that the company is saving at least 40 man hours per day. Distinctive Software Solutions’ chief technical director, Lazaros Haleplidis explains: “along with our Firewall Automation Management and Provisioning software based solution, the customer gains additional benefits from HP Network Automation. Before the deployment of the solution, it was very difficult for them to verify the firewall’s existing huge configuration files and keep them optimised. Now, with this solution, each time a new rule is created it performs sanity checks on the access list and optimisation is done automatically, which is a significant step change. Having an automated procedure that has been tested also eliminates the human error and enables the customer to generate accurate compliance reports.”
Learn more at hp.com/go/sddc
– Lazaros Haleplidis, chief technical director, Distinctive Software Solutions
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4AA5-7575EEW, April 2015
