Robert BarnesIT ManagerLeedshttp://www.traveleads.co.uk/
Established 1971, with offices in Leeds & Edinburgh, Traveleads is one of the UK's leading travel companies - providing customized travel management services to the corporate, sport and media/arts sectors. Licensed by IATA, CAA (ATOL), ABTA and ATOC, Traveleads arranges travel for a wide-ranging and interesting base of clients including film and production crews, BBC broadcasters, sports teams and spectators from over 40 different sports, conference and corporate event delegates, arts performers (ballet troupes, symphony orchestras, etc) and student excursions. Traveleads' network is looked after by IT Manager Robert Barnes and comprises of 60 users over two sites, who access the Internet via the company's 2Mb leased line.
Traveleads have 60 users in a Windows environment. Internet access is via a 2Mb Leased Line
Traveleads needed to improve their web, firewall and email security as the company was moving to a higher speed connection and wanted to open up web access to the whole company, including their recently opened branch office in Edinburgh, which required an IPSEC VPN. Robert was also looking for a flexible solution that would provide time-based web filtering and sufficiently granular reporting and monitoring to recognize web trends, peak bandwidth usage periods and identify top users.
Upon evaluation, the advantages of using a software-based appliance were immediately obvious. Robert was delighted to discover that the solution ran perfectly on a spare machine, with just 756MB RAM, without any loss of performance. On further inspection it also became apparent that installation and management were far simpler than comparable systems and the modular approach offered great flexibility and therefore further cost savings.
Advanced Firewall (with added modules for web filtering, email security, anti-Spam and bandwidth management) has been safeguarding Traveleads' network for over 4 years now and is still running efficiently on the same hardware platform. Robert says the flexible web controls have proved particularly useful, as have the reporting and monitoring functions. The firewall and VPN features also offer him everything he needs, via an easy to use interface.
Service has been outstanding from day one
One of the main considerations in adopting Smoothwall was that it is a software solution that can run on otherwise redundant hardware but still becomes a dedicated stand-alone firewall once installed. This helps to greatly reduce the cost but also allows flexibility for hardware upgrades
The internet controls have allowed us to restrict users to work based sites during work hours but open up things like shopping sites before and after. Monitoring allows us to see who has accessed which sites, who are the top users and what are the most visited domains/sites. We can also see peak periods of bandwidth usage
Advanced Firewall has enabled us to do everything you would expect from a hardware based firewall system and also offers us very easily configurable site to site and remote user (road warrior) VPN access
Installation and management was far simpler than comparable systems and the modular approach offered great flexibility and therefore further cost savings
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