Chelmsford College has a new all-in-one security appliance to protect its IT network, covering over 5,000 students and 500 staff. The ASG 625 from Astaro is providing both network security and content filtering services to the college.
Chelmsford College provides further and higher education services and support to its students. The College has three sites, which are linked by dedicated connections back to its main data centre where a 100 Megabit leased line is in place to connect to the Internet. In total there are around 40 servers across the network, as well as over 1,000 desktop PCs that are used by students and staff. Its previous security solution was not meeting its requirements, particularly around content filtering. When it came to the end of the system’s support contract, Philip Lock, Network Systems Manager at Chelmsford decided to look at alternatives.
“Our requirements are quite straightforward: we wanted our IT assets to be protected, as well as ensuring that students adhere to our IT usage policies. Secondly, any solution that we chose would have to help us make the most of the Internet connection we have in place,” said Lock. “We trialled a number of hardware and software options to provide our security and content filtering, and the Astaro appliance was both extremely easy to use and provided the performance levels that we expected.”
Astaro’s ASG 625 is the largest in the range of all-in-one security appliances that the company provides, including a deep packet inspection firewall, Intrusion Prevention, anti-virus, IPSec and SSL VPN support, email encryption and web content filtering. The ASG 625 scales up to support over 4,000 concurrent users with the firewall throughput rate of up to 9 Gigabit per second. Redundant hot-swappable hard disks and power supplies help ensure high availability.
“Since completing our implementation, the ASG 625 has delivered on its promise. The level of support we have seen from Astaro has been extremely good, and we have been able to make the most of our leased line connection. Overall, we have been extremely happy with the performance and management of the appliance,” added Lock.
Andrew Fourie, UK sales and marketing director at Astaro, added: “Education organisations are now a days as complex in structure and as demanding in their security requirements as any corporate Enterprise. The Internet is critical to their day–to-day activity as events such as exams take place online, there had to be no question in performance. We integrated the appliance with their 5,000 account Active Directory installation to manage single sign on Internet Access for the College’s students and staff to ensure that they are meeting IT usage policies and their duty of care to the user community. Astaro’s approach is based on providing the highest level of performance with a user-friendly management interface, making it simpler to understand and deliver security solutions. Most of all, our response to user requirements in this sector such as HTTPS scanning and multi-link WAN load balancing ensures that we can continue to provide our education customers with security solutions that meet their specific requirements.”
