The Challenge
The Greene County Board of Developmental Disabilities, an agency committed to serving individuals with mental and physical disabilities, had a small network with little network protection. The eight users were networked together though a wireless broadband access point with a wireless router as their only form of network protection. The router did not offer web content filtering, intrusion prevention or reporting features. The lack of advanced network security features was causing security issues at the agency.

The Requirements
The Network Specialist for the Green County Board of Developmental Disabilities wanted to deploy a solution that would provide ant-virus, web content filtering, intrusion prevention and reporting features. “With only a wireless router as our network security solution we were leaving our network open to all sorts of threats. We were looking for a complete security solution to secure our network,” said the Network Specialist.

The Solution
The Network Specialist found the solution to his problem in the Astaro Security Gateway. After evaluating and considering several other products from SonicWall and Cisco, Greene County decided to deploy the Astaro Security Gateway software appliance on a low end desktop the agency already had.  The Network Specialist explained, “We decided to go with the Astaro because it offered a complete security solution and all the features we needed to secure our network at a more affordable price. Also, the ability to implement the Astaro software appliance on our hardware makes the Astaro solution even more attractive.”

Success with Astaro
Replacing the wireless router as their network security solution with the Astaro Security Gateway saves the Network Specialist approximately five hours a week in monitoring and troubleshooting. “The reporting and logging features take much of burden of monitoring our network activities off of me,” he stated. 

The Astaro Security Gateway made it possible for the Network Specialist to monitor bandwidth and network usage using the Astaro Security Gateway. The daily reports indicated that network usage was peaking for two hours at a time, every two hours. With just a few clicks, he found the offending PC and was able to rectify the problem.

He was also pleased with the Astaro Security Gateway’s graphical-user-interface and reliability, “The Astaro Security Gateway surpassed all my expectations. The GUI makes it a breeze to manage and the reliability makes it a joy to work with. I know our network is protected with Astaro.”