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How to Determine if Hyper-Converged Infrastructure is Right for Your Business

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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

At this time of year, it is common for many of us to reflect on the past 12 months and think about what we want to achieve in the New Year. For those in the IT space, many teams have already begun to envision and define which projects they will be working on in 2016. Is your infrastructure one of them?

In the past year, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) has grown in popularity. With vendors like Nutanix in the market space, IT departments are now provided with a new option when it comes to scaling their data-centers. We’ve have had many conversations with our clients on this relatively new offering in 2015 and have helped determine if this solution is right for our clients’ business.

In our last blog post, we covered off the main differences between converged and hyper-converged infrastructures. Yet the question remains, is HCI right for you? [Read more…] about How to Determine if Hyper-Converged Infrastructure is Right for Your Business

How Juniper’s Space Security Director Accelerated A Complex Firewall Deployment

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How Juniper's Space Security Director Accelerated a Complex Firewall Deployment

With the rise of the always on, at home workforce, companies actually have multiple locations that are geographically dispersed. And this shift of the traditional ‘head office’ model is just a sneak peak of the future of business.

Fast Company reported survey results from business leaders at a Global Leadership Summit in London – “34% of company leaders will have more than half of their company’s full-time workforce working remotely.” And according to a 2015 survey from Global Work Place Analytics, 80% to 90% of the workforce would like to telework at least part time with two to three days a week being the ideal balance of concentrative work (at home) and collaborative work (at the office).

As companies continue to grow and add remote office locations, IT teams once again are challenged with getting employees connected, all while keeping data safe. All of these locations need to have the devices securely connected to your network and protected from outside threats, so a firewall in each location is a must. But how does an IT team manage the set-up and monitoring of each individual firewall?

Your IT Staff Can’t Be Everywhere At Once

This explosion of remote sites means that organizations are going to have a lot of security hardware spread out across a country, or even globally. Every time a new location is added, not only does the equipment need to be physically delivered and connected, but it then needs to be configured to work on your network. And the truth is, most employees at these locations are not going to have the expertise to do this for you.

The challenge for IT departments – it’s not going to be possible to have your IT staff economically travel to every location to set up a firewall.

Here’s an example…

One of our larger enterprise customers needed to bring an additional 70 new remote locations online within the space of a month. There was no way their networking team could travel across the country and complete the project on time. Although engaging outside contractors to help would be one way to solve this pain point with locations across Canada, which would have been an expensive option. Instead, we proposed that they use a Juniper’s Security Director to automate and “template” the deployment.

Juniper Space Security Director – Scalable and Responsive Security Management

Juniper’s Space Security Director uses an intuitive web-based interface to centrally manage and enforce security policies across your network. With Security Director you can:

  • Scale your policies across multiple SRX Firewalls
  • Centrally control and manage VPN, IPS, application security and security intelligence
  • Enforce application usage policies through included AppFW management
  • Leverage existing VPN profiles to create site-to-site IPsec tunnels with a few clicks

For our customer, Space Security Director was the idea tool to help them achieve their goal of deploying and configuring the SRX Firewalls at their new branch locations in under a month. Not only does Security Director automate the deployment but it also offers operational simplicity by providing configuration management and policy pushes to the entire firewall fleet.

Our Partnership Resulted in a Successful Project

Lanworks worked with the customer to help them evaluate Space Security Director, and after our sales team had demonstrated to them that Juniper’s offering was the answer to their problem we continued to partner with them to ensure the project was a success.

Our Network Engineers helped design and architect Security Director for the customer, with the goal of allowing their own staff to be able run the project with minimal assistance resulting in lower service costs to them.

The SRX Firewalls needed were pre-provisioned at their head office, sent to the remote locations across Canada and quickly configured without needing any intervention by any of the branch location’s employees thanks to Space Security Director. By partnering with us and Juniper, our customer completed what seemed an unsurmountable task on time and under budget.

No matter where you are in any of your security projects, Lanworks is here to help. Connect with one of our sales associates today to begin your partnership with Lanworks.

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