Rathbone Training - Case Study
 |
 |
Charity Keeps Students Away from Temptation with SonicWALL
As a National organisation working with young people who have been unsuccessful in mainstream education, Rathbone was aware that its network security program was unable to cope with the browsing habits of 12,000 energetic and inventive learners until SonicWALL came to its assistance.
Many of Rathbone's learners are young people who very often have not been successful in their secondary education. As a result they require access to education and training opportunities tailored specifically to their learning and support needs. With 1,200 employees, Rathbone helps to train over 12,000 young people and adults every year, in 77 training centres located regionally across the United Kingdom.
Each training centre makes use of the internet as an educational tool. Understandably, given the challenging nature of their backgrounds, Rathbone has found it hard to persuade every learner that they need to adhere to a responsible internet usage policy.
Historically the centres' firewall was located on a stand-alone Linux PC. Anti-virus protection was installed on every desktop and server. The content filtering application was also installed piecemeal across the organisation's 1200 PCs and servers. Everything - the firewall, anti-virus and content filtering system - had to be installed, updated and managed manually by just four field engineers. Managing these security applications across a vast geographically dispersed network was very time consuming on top of an already busy workload. As a consequence, Rathbone's ability to maintain control and ensure operational efficiency was sometimes compromised.
PCs were often left exposed to a wide variety of threats. In April 2005 it came to light that some of the systems had not been updated for eight months. The deciding factor was when the charity's core management system was attacked and crashed. The system could not be revived despite Rathbone's best attempts.
At this point, Rathbone sought assistance from Crucial Systems, a SonicWALL reseller, to restore functionality to their key systems. Whilst undertaking the work, project staff quickly recognised that the charity's network security was inadequate. Crucial Systems made recommendations after reviewing network security in order to provide a more secure environment for Rathbone learners and staff.
It was recommended that a SonicWALL network security and connectivity solution should be installed throughout the organisation. Previously, each training centre had two ADSL broadband connections. One line was for the PCs in the training suites and the other for the administration systems. The idea behind it was that having two connections would deliver more speed and better security. Rathbone's engineers where able to create two networks, one for training and one optimised for administration, from a single ADSL connection. They also reduced the number of security applications on each PC. Every office now has a SonicWALL TZ170W wireless multi-function security appliance, which provides intrusion prevention, anti-spam, content filtering and Gateway Anti-Virus protection. The charity has also installed one SonicWALL PRO 3060 at its head office.