Red Cross Selects Fortinet to Protect Sensitive Data
Swiss Red Cross Relies on FortiGate™ Systems for Reliability, Integrated Security and Cost-Effectiveness
Fortinet® – the pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions – today announced that Swiss Red Cross, the national humanitarian organization of Switzerland, has chosen Fortinet’s FortiGate™ multi-threat security systems to help protect sensitive data located on its headquarters’ network from viruses, worms and other computer threats, and to help provide secure communications between various Red Cross chapter offices located in Switzerland.
The headquarters IT department of Swiss Red Cross acts as an application service provider (ASP) for all Red Cross chapter offices in Switzerland. Remote offices are connected via the Internet to the data centre in Bern, which stores private information on members, such as personal data on victims of wars and organ donors and receivers. Prior to the Fortinet deployment, the Swiss Red Cross outsourced its security services but found that solution to be expensive, difficult to manage, unreliable and ineffective. In fact, hardware blackouts regularly occurred, the protection was incomplete, and the reporting tool did not meet the government compliance requirements. As a result, Swiss Red Cross sought an integrated, multi-threat security solution that would be deployed and managed internally.
In seeking a new solution, Swiss Red Cross worked with Netlan AG, its long-time network integration partner, to find a security vendor that had a strong market reputation and would offer integrated security. The security solution itself would have a high availability configuration option and would be cost-effective.
Based on Netlan’s recommendations and an internal evaluation, Swiss Red Cross deployed Fortinet’s FortiGate multi-threat security systems at its headquarters in Bern to help secure its network and related data with the integrated security functions provided by the FortiGate appliance: firewall, virtual private networking (VPN) antivirus, intrusion prevention, spyware prevention and anti-spam.
“As a globally-respected non-profit organization it was critical for us to have a strong network security solution in place and one that would prove to be cost-effective,” said Benno Stucki, CIO of Swiss Red Cross. “We chose Fortinet’s integrated security systems because they allow us to get broad network protection while controlling our deployment and management costs. In fact, with FortiGate, we save about 45 per cent a year on recurring costs we had with our former outsourced solution.”
For granular security analysis and reporting, Red Cross is using FortiAnalyzer™ to securely aggregate and analyze log data from its FortiGate security appliances in order to get a broad view of security information and to help document compliance with Swiss governmental regulations related to privacy and disclosure of security breaches.
“ROI and comprehensive reporting are important for any enterprise looking at implementing a network security solution, but it’s even more critical for non-profits,” said Andre Stewart, Fortinet’s EMEA vice president. “Our solutions help customers like Swiss Red Cross benefit from integrated network security at optimized operational costs with maximum control and visibility.”
