Project Scope
Security solution implementation for one of the oldest and biggest high education organizations in the Gulf region to assure security compliance with design and implementation of best practices.
Customer Overview
One of the oldest and biggest high education organizations in the Gulf area, with more than 200,000 students and more than 20,000 employees. It is considered one of the most distinguished educational organization in terms of the number of students, the number of scientific and theoretical fields of study and the exclusiveness of certain specializations such as Seas Sciences, Geology, Nuclear Engineering, Medical Engineering, Meteorology and Aviation and Mineralization. Our customer not only has a regular students program but it also has an external program to make it easy for all students to get higher education. It also established the Deanship of Distant Teaching to cope with the development in learning and teaching technology.
Business Challenges
- The organization needed to revamp its old legacy security solution and migrate to Next-Generation Security Technologies, to face the overwhelming increase in attacks and the uncontrollable change in attacks methodologies.
- The challenge was in migrating this huge number of users to the new Access-Control system to ensure that the users are compliant with the organization’s policy, taking into consideration the various types of Operating Systems of the users’ machines, tablets, mobile handset who should be authorized to access different resources of the IT services of the organization.
- Another challenge was found in migration of the old legacy perimeter Internet Firewall to Next-Generation Firewall that has different syntax and thousands of security policy statements.
- The migration in such environment must stick to having minimum down times, and ensure at all stages the quality of all the migrated services, in terms of keeping it secured and with no impact on production
How We Helped
In this project, our team worked in the offline to develop a very sophisticated Low Level Design & Network Migration Plan that ensures:
- Applying the best practice in deploying each component of the security solution.
- Having smooth migration with minimum planned down time.
- Simplicity of the design.
In the following stage, our consultants developed an Acceptance Test Plan (ATP) document that includes all the tests to be conducted after the implementation to declare that the solution has been implemented as per the design. Then, implementation was done by CONNECT-PS experts through predefined phases with clear milestones to ensure smooth migration and quality of delivery.
Benefits for Business
We assisted the customer to gain the following benefits:
- Ensure confidentiality, integrity & authenticity of data access.
- Availing a full internet traffic visibility which helps in future decision making.
- Simplifying mitigation and isolation of attacks.
- Realize ROI by deploying Next-Generation Security solutions.
Products List
Cisco Security Solution
- Cisco Next Generation Adaptive Security Appliance 5585-X
- Cisco SourceFire module with Power services.
- Cisco SourceFire Defense Center FS750
- Cisco Identity Service Engine
- Kiwi Syslog Server
- Cisco Next Generation Adaptive Security Appliance 5585-X for VPN termination.