JERSEY CITY, N.J.-Since winning the inaugural 2012 Extreme Network Makeover contest from Horsetail Technologies and Credit Union Journal, Liberty Savings FCU has realized many benefits. The latest is a state-of-the-art enhanced security platform supported by SonicWALL Intrusion Prevention Service (SonicWALL IPS).
"The updates have been going very well," said Liberty Savings FCU Chief Information Officer Jim Miller, whose entry was selected from more than 100 credit unions that applied for the $100,000 Extreme Network Makeover. "From a security perspective, we have features we didn't have before, and while we didn't have any issues, the new firewall does make us feel better." SonicWALL IPS delivers a configurable, high-performance, deep packet inspection engine for extended protection of key network services such as web, e-mail, file transfer, Windows services and domain names systems (DNS), explained Mark Berman, principle at Horsetail Technologies. "SonicWALL IPS is designed to protect against application vulnerabilities as well as worms, Trojans and backdoor exploits."
The SonicWALL program uses Unified Threat Management (UTM,) a departure from the traditional firewall, which has gained growing popularity since market adoption in 2004. This evolution has changed the industry as UTM is an all-inclusive security product that performs multiple security functions within one single appliance.
"Due to its size, there additional benefits to this firewall," said Miller. "We will likely see savings on our electric bill and have more space in our server room."
UTM Best Practices
Berman explained that UTM contains network firewalling, network intrusion prevention and gateway antivirus (AV), gateway anti-spam, virtual private network (VPN), content filtering, load balancing, data leak prevention and on-appliance reporting.
"Many older Cisco firewalls and support, for example, has expired, which can leave credit unions vulnerable. As a result, there is an opportunity for newer threats," said Berman. "Having a UTM firewall keeps credit unions up to date."
While other companies offer UTM products, Berman and his team selected SonicWALL because it reduces cost and the man-hours related to maintaining and updating signatures for new hacker attacks via the distributed enforcement architecture (DEA).
"Signature granularity allows SonicWALL IPS to detect and prevent attacks based on a global, attack group or per-signature basis to provide maximum flexibility and control false positives," said Berman.
The process of transferring and updating from an old firewall to a new firewall is an exhaustive, detailed process. In order to not disrupt Liberty Savings' operations, the process was undertaken at night and on weekends over the course of a few months.
"Horsetail has been great to work with. Our branch hours limit the work they can do so they have been working after seven on weekdays, Saturday afternoons and Sundays," said Miller.
In the coming weeks, Liberty Savings headquarters will have a SonicWALL NSA 2400 and each of its two branches will house SonicWALL T2-215W. "These have the same functionality but on a different scale," Berman said of the latter. "The best thing is that the security platform is located in one device so management has just one interface (per branch)."
Aside from the extreme importance of protecting employee, member and data security, the system offers detailed monthly reports that meet NCUA examination regulations. "This has made the process much easier than before," said Miller.
Moving forward, Liberty Savings' monthly reports will include detailed analysis covering:
* Endpoint security threats
* Data usage (who is using what files through the firewall)
* Web activity (by user, by site, by category)
* Web filter (what attempts to visit unapproved sites were made)
* Intrusions (attempted, blocked and where targeted)
* Remote access sessions
* E-mail security reports
* Anti-spam reports
* Realized makeover benefits
Server Upgrade Coming
To date, Liberty Savings has received new hardware offerings from Dell, network monitoring services from n-Able, help desk ticketing from Autotask, server room cabling services from Powersum, disaster recovery services from OGO, certified project and strategic planning from Horsetail, as well as e-mail encryption from Horsetail powered by Zix.
"We are next looking forward to the server upgrade," said Miller. "Throughout the process I've been updating our executive management team and everyone has been pleased with the progress."
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