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The firewall market is expanding with $2.3 billion predicted to be pumped into the sector by 2025, according to Research and Markets. With an aim to secure end-to-end connections, firewalls are considered a critical part of network security.
See below to learn how organizations in different industries are employing firewall solutions to solve their cybersecurity challenges:
5 firewall case studies
1. Adventist Health
California-based Adventist Health has a network of 24 hospital facilities, 320 clinics, 34,000 employees, and 350 locations spanning four states.
With such a distributed system, Adventist’s firewall intricacies went created an inconsistent policy across the Adventist network.
The whole process made management inefficient and time-consuming for the IT team. Adventist’s other challenge was to consolidate distributed firewalls and ensure compliance with each one of them, without having to write 2,000 lines of code at each physical site.
“We need to make sure that data doesn’t leak out or go anywhere it shouldn’t be, and we need to have full control of our edge across the system, because we have many providers who need to access the internet directly at the edge,” says Ed Vanderpool of Adventist Health.
The team employed Cisco Firewall Migration software to consolidate all of its firewall tools in one place without any extra programming. The migration tool helped Adventist eliminate the need for manual migration while reducing any chances of human error.
With appropriate firewall measures in place, Adventist achieved operational efficiency, firewall management, better threat protection, and unified management.
“The firewall migration speed was very fast and the complexity was cut by more than half,” Vanderpool says.
“And moving off a legacy product or a product that may have certain holes in it — and having a firewall migration tool to pull that information off, clean it up, and feed it into our infrastructure — has prevented security issues, guaranteed.
“We have a consistent architecture from edge to edge, from our hospitals and other sites all the way through our data center platform. We have consistency and standardization, and we need less staff overhead to maintain our firewalls. And our downtimes are pretty low.”
Industry: Health care
Firewall provider: Cisco Secure Firewall and Cisco Firewall Migration Tool
Outcomes:
- Reduced firewall complexities with streamlined system maintenance
- Saved up to 144 hours in migrations, downtimes, and manual log management
- Improved threat detection ability with an integrated organizational platform
- Introduced HIPAA-compliant firewall architecture
See more: 5 Top Firewall Trends
2. SNCF Réseau
SNCF Réseau provides railway infrastructure based out of France and is the amalgamation of Réseau Ferré de France (RFF), Direction de la Circulation Ferroviaire (DCF), and SNCF Infra. SNCF has over 52,000 employees and generates €6.5 billion annually.
SNCF faced several challenges to tackle: a legacy cyber infrastructure with minimal threat detection; absence of ad-hoc and around-the-clock security measures; and integration of information and communications technology (ICT) with operations, signage, and electrical power protection.
Moreover, SNCF had different security zones for continuous monitoring, including the public internet, a private cloud, a restricted zone, and another security zone.
“When you attack transport networks, you can have a huge impact very quickly, including on human lives,” says Guillaume Poupard of the French National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI).
SNCF deployed SecLab to create a bidirectional filter to separate the industrial and IT content of the corporation. The move provided smooth operational system efficiencies for SNCF and in-house traffic control.
The traffic visibility came with advanced threat detection, identifying corrupt FTP transfers, better insights into URL blocks, and attack isolation. The solution worked on the principle of isolation and filtering: isolating each security system with data transfer measures, so any threat type can be neutralized and contained.
“Installing an isolation solution allows you to block any attack that might have gotten past the firewall,” says Xavier Facélina, CEO, Seclab.
“The attacker then finds themself at a dead end, unable to continue their incursion. The firewall combination gives you the level of filtering which is impossible to implement electronically, and the level of isolation offered by the Seclab unit, which cannot be disrupted by the attacker.”
Industry: Rail
Firewall providers: Stormshield and Seclab
Outcomes:
- Consistent firewall protection across all four domains
- Filtering SNCF’s conventional IT infrastructure with the industrial one
- Dedicated, 365-day intrusion prevention system (IPS)
See more: 7 Different Types of Firewalls & Deployment Options
3. Lisbon School Department
The Lisbon School Department in Maine includes four campuses, over 1,300 students, and a central office controlling multiple teaching and education departments.
The school district wanted to upgrade their existing network infrastructure across the campus while boosting internet speed. Lisbon was set up for a 1 Gbps internet connection but couldn’t realize it, due to older equipment, frequent hardware failure, and a legacy Layer 3 firewall.
Lisbon picked Netgate to install a third-party firewall at their premises. Lisbon and Netgate used a combination of Layer 3 routers, pfSense Plus, Intel 1 Atom C3558 2.2 GHz CPU, AES-NI, QuickAssist, and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) instructions for maintaining high-bandwidth, encrypted traffic across campus, and hardware improvement.
The solution included deploying four on-premises devices, with an added cold spare for broad connectivity, upgrade to either a Layer 4 or Layer 7 firewall, and provide better configuration and support for future hardware failures. The Lisbon School Department selected Netgate 5100 solution for campus-wide deployment, assuring the 1 Gbps speed mark and VPN connectivity.
Industry: Education
Firewall providers: Netgate pfSense Plus
Outcomes:
- Reduced incidences of hardware failure
- Consistent 1 Gbps of internet speed
- Campus-wide VPN accessibility and a single firewall with authentication ability
- Secure-proof access to each remote worker and the ability to scale during Lisbon’s October conference
4. Hubo
Hubo is Belgian DIY retailer with 1,000 employees, 75 franchise stores, and 150 shops.
Hubo’s security challenges were scattered, with an ineffective internet connection, a centralized yet complex network, firewall migration to their multiple distributed locations, and poor traffic visibility. The lower visibility also made Hubo’s network systems vulnerable to low-band cyberattacks.
“All internet traffic was coming to our stores using our HQ,” says Van Regenmortel of Hubo.
“But this was not a long-term solution. We wanted to migrate firewall security to each of our shops, so we needed to be able to scan store traffic and visualize what was happening in our locations. As a team of four, we have responsibility for the whole IT server and network infrastructure at Hubo, so we needed something that could be easily controlled as a small team.
“We needed more than a hardware refresh. We were looking at implementing SD-WAN — a very different architecture that enabled local internet breakouts at every location. Hubo has over a hundred stores across the country, so it was critical that the new firewall solution delivered uninterrupted network availability and direct access to cloud services.”
Hubo picked Barracuda to replace their legacy firewall solution and prioritize traffic for business continuity. The transition from Hubo to Barracuda and back to Hubo was seamless and came with unified but decentralized access control and automated deployment.
“Managing everything with a single rule set saves us time and resources,” Regenmortel says.
“Being able to apply one global rule set means the team can easily migrate settings from one store to another. When we need to change an application, we just change one rule, which is applied to all locations. We can connect our shops and temporary stores at the flick of a switch.
“End-to-end visibility with our current firewall means we can easily visualize and monitor network performance and quickly troubleshoot problems and any immediate threats. We can also more effectively monitor our cloud-based applications to ensure everything runs at peak performance. Scanning next-gen applications were really hard on our old hardware, so we always had performance problems. VPN has also been a big plus for us — we’ve also started to use that now.”
Industry: Retail
Firewall provider: Barracuda CloudGen Firewall and Data Unit
Outcomes:
- Better system and traffic visibility
- Most Hubo stores are up in minutes after downtime
- Automated deployments
- Cloud efficiency optimization with a capacity to handle unprecedented demands, especially during sales hours
See more: Barracuda CloudGen Firewall Product Review
5. Terra Verde
Phoenix-based Terra Verde is a managed service provider (MSP) offering compliance with PCI, HIPAA, policy structure, and on-premises security.
Within three years of being in business, Terra Verde expanded through acquisition in the managed security niche with a focus on retail and health care small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Terra Verde’s security complexities increased as soon as it acquired other business verticals. Now, most of their security focused on ensuring consistent antivirus protection across Verde sites, firewall defense, and endpoint monitoring. Moreover, its retail customers faced some security backlog, such as phishing incidents, spamming, and ransomware attacks.
“We saw that our retail customers had been too busy to stop and ask: How do we protect our brand?” says Ed Vasko, CEO, Terra Verde.
“And how do we provide the right level of security?”
That’s when Verde realized the need to deploy a third-party firewall.
“Ever since we deployed our existing firewall and security structure, we’ve been able to find ways to integrate our proprietary core monitoring platforms and our core alerting platforms with the Sophos Central management console,” Vasko says.
“Now, we can quickly and continuously monitor all of our retail franchises from a central hub, and we’ve had immense success with that.”
Once Verde deployed Sophos, the company experimented to deploy an integrated Verde-Sophos solution on its clients, the first one being Lithia Motors. The solution ensured endpoint defense, potential URL and threat blocker, and zero-day malware protection.
Industry: IT
Firewall provider: Sophos, Sophos Endpoint Protection Advanced, and Sophos RED
Outcomes:
- Consistent firewall implementation across Verde and their clients
- Enhanced operational efficiency
- Centralized security management through Sophos Console
- End-to-end encryption across all devices, on-premises or remote
See more: 5 Top Firewall Software for Companies
Bottom Line
These case studies show examples of firewalls being used in various industries: health care; rail; education; retail; and IT.
Clients selected a range of providers in the firewall market for the implementations: Cisco; Stormshield; Seclab; Netgate; Barracuda Networks; and Sophos.
Together, the organizations’ firewall solutions improved numerous aspects of their networks:
- Network downtime
- Network maintenance
- Network threat detection
- Network intrusion prevention
- Network bandwidth
- Network traffic visibility
- Network management
- Cloud optimization
