Situation

Holiday Retirement utilized broadband connectivity for integral office operations and service to its residents. More importantly, the critical need for connectivity was related to employee time tracking, keeping track of all new resident move-ins, as well as food ordering for the facilities.

Due to circumstances beyond our control, Holiday was in a position to replace their broadband network in a very short period of time. Holiday Retirement conducted a thorough search for a business partner who could offer managed broadband connectivity and network security.

Holiday Retirement selected Industry Retail Group (IRG), a premier provider of broadband-enabled network services, serving retailers and multi-site companies. The company relied on IRG to provide network security for its distributed network. "We were looking for a network security vendor that gave us the flexibility to easily manage our large and distributed network as well as support our need to reduce costs and simplify our network," said Steve McDowell, Chief Information Officer at Holiday Retirement.

Solution

IRG was tasked by Holiday Retirement to deploy nearly 300 network security appliances in the U.S. in less than a week because of renewal issues with their previous network provider. IRG turned to its new partner, Fortinet®. FortiGate® appliances gave IRG the ability to quickly enable a 3G WAN network in a very limited time frame, as well as providing a USB slot and the ability to have a single appliance deployed at each location. No other network security vendor was able to meet the security requirements in the accelerated time frame and within the cost parameters.

To add to the challenge, the entire deployment took place over Easter weekend. In doing so, Holiday, IRG and Fortinet faced the possibility of vacations and office closings typical of holiday weekends.

Together with Fortinet, IRG identified a technical solution for Holiday Retirement. Then, IRG developed a project team with a strict timeline for the deployment. In many cases, IRG and Fortinet overcame the challenges of weak signals, and in other cases, needed to create a wireless network where none existed.

A single FortiGate-50B or FortiGate-60B appliance is now located at each of the 274 Holiday Retirement locations, protecting all data traversing the network. A FortiGate-310B is also deployed at Holiday Retirement's Salem, OR headquarters to serve as the core network security solution and connecting the 274 remote locations to headquarters so that the newly deployed WAN is trusted and secure.

To manage all its remote appliances, Holiday Retirement has also deployed a FortiManager-3000 central management system at its corporate headquarters. FortiManager minimizes the administrative effort required to deploy, configure, monitor and maintain the full range of network protection services provided by Fortinet products.

"The Holiday Retirement deployment is a great example of what powerful technology and great partnerships can achieve," said Mike Luzio, CEO and President of Industry Retail Group. "While Holiday Retirement presented us with a daunting task, we knew we could stand up to the challenge with the proven abilities of FortiGate product line and our partnership with Fortinet as the market leader in integrated network security appliances. Deploying nearly 300 techs in a five-day period was no easy task; however, we were confident in the experience of our team to complete this project with excellence for Holiday Retirement."

All FortiGate systems are kept up to date automatically by Fortinet's FortiGuard® Network, which helps ensure protection against the most damaging, content-based threats from email and Web traffic such as viruses, worms, intrusions, other unwanted network traffic and more - around the clock and around the world. This helps the network security staff to focus on strategic goals rather constantly checking for new virus and other malware attacks.

Success

Among the many benefits that Holiday Retirement has seen since its Fortinet deployment by IRG were better security, easy and expedited deployment, easy management, cost savings and a single product to manage. The Fortinet deployment has also enabled Holiday to support future network security initiatives, which include building out a wireline network with redundancy to the wireless network.

The key behind being able to have 330 locations up and running on Fortinet appliances in a record five days is due to IRG's efficient project management, coupled with Fortinet's integrated security approach. This allowed Holiday Retirement to secure each location with a single device, minimizing space consumption and capital equipment cost and allowing an expeditious deployment process.

"We were able to get 274 locations up and running on the Fortinet platform in five days. It doesn't get much better than that," concluded Luzio.

About Industry Retail Group

Industry Retail Group, Inc. (IRG) has a simple objective: to provide retailers and other multi-site organizations with the premier suite of broadband-enabled network services that will help provide a competitive advantage while keeping costs in check. Through the managed integration of leading edge technology components such as DSL, Cable, EVDO, and traditional access, IRG is able to provide the most comprehensive network coverage and bandwidth availability to meet each client's unique business requirements.

Additionally, each IRG WAN is uniquely designed to maximize network security, scalability, application support and overall network performance. As an added benefit, our comprehensive advanced network services suite, including but not limited to IRG|WiFi, IRG|VoIP, and IRG|SecurView, allows clients to further leverage their WAN investment by overlaying additional, bottom-line impacting services.

About Fortinet

Fortinet is the pioneer and leading provider of ASIC-accelerated unified threat management, or UTM, security systems, which are used by enterprises and service providers to increase their security while reducing total operating costs. Fortinet solutions were built from the ground up to integrate multiple levels of security protection--including firewall, antivirus, intrusion prevention, VPN, spyware prevention and anti-spam - designed to help customers protect against network and content level threats. Leveraging a custom ASIC and unified interface, Fortinet solutions offer advanced security functionality that scales from remote office to chassis-based solutions with integrated management and reporting. Fortinet solutions have won multiple awards around the world and are the only security products that are certified in six programs by ICSA Labs: (Firewall, Antivirus, IPSec, SSL, Network IPS and Anti-Spam). Fortinet is based in Sunnyvale, California.

Gartner Recognizes IRG in its publication recommending U.S. Telecom Service Providers. Read more...

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