AvidFirewall NG Rollout Observations
By David Scott, Managing Member at Avid Communications
Last summer, Avid began offering AvidFirewall NG–a sophisticated firewall service designed to thwart the aggressive hacking threats posed by global, organized crime–to existing clients.
Our service features a highly reliable premise firewall, and gives businesses:
- Protection from sophisticated external attacks
- Blocking of outbound attempts to visit high-risk web sites
- Identification of compromised computers and devices
- Management of acceptable usage of Internet connections by employes and guests.
Later last Fall, we opened up sales to new clients as well. It’s been a hot seller, and we’ve struggled to keep enough equipment in inventory to meet demand.
We’ve installed the service across many major industry segments, including government, financial services, retail and healthcare.
New clients have chosen AvidFirewall NG primarily for one of two reasons:
- To address the complex and evolving threat landscape. Advanced protection capabilities that defend against known and emerging threats: Antivirus, Botnet Coverage, IP/Domain Reputation, Next Generation Firewall Application Control, and Web Filtering
- To meet the requirements of an overall PCI, HIPAA or other compliance plan.
AvidFirewall NG has also played a role in complex network setups, including with clients who have many individual locations and network security requirements that vary depending by department. In short, it (and we) have been put through our paces from the earliest days.
For one client, we were able to replace a costly MPLS network with an efficient VPN-based network to connect several sites. Our Fortinet equipment has proven highly reliable, and aside from the expected security benefits of a next-generation firewall, Avid’s ability to re-engineer a network has brought added value and a big step up in reliability.
In several cases we developed a plan to upgrade Ethernet switches and wiring prior to the deployment of Avid Firewall NG. Avid’s ability to address these basic infrastructure issues concurrent with security upgrades has been key to successful deployments.
Because of the greatly enhanced security aspects of AvidFirewall NG, and the ability to tailor these protections to individual businesses, we were concerned about sheer volume of configuration change requests we might get. However, our diligent requirements discovery process prior to installation has resulted in a fairly low volume of post-installation requests. It doesn’t hurt that Avid has over a decade’s experience configuring thousands of firewalls.
Avid’s white glove approach and responsiveness sets us apart from the competition.
Our engineers take the time to truly understand our client’s systems, security and network requirements and as a result we deliver holistic solution that will continually evolve to meet the ever changing cybersecurity challenges that every business faces.
In the future, our blog will feature brief case studies on specific roll outs. For security purposes, we generally won’t identify clients or provide details that would allow specific customers to be pinpointed. Even so, I think we’ll be able to convey the importance of AvidFirewall NG to our clients.
And as a teaser, stay tuned for an exciting announcement shortly about how we will be taking AvidFirewall NG to a whole new level of sophistication.
