Erdinger Weißbräu, a leading private brewery in Germany, faced a significant challenge in managing its complex IT structure while maintaining its traditional brewing methods. The brewery, which produces 1.5 million hectoliters of wheat beer annually and exports to over 70 countries, required an efficient and easily manageable security environment for its operations. The brewery's development was heading towards the internet, necessitating a robust security solution. The brewery also needed to separate its internal networks, such as the production network from the sales area, to ensure the security of its trade secrets and protect against disruptive attacks. The brewery considered various market leaders, including Cisco and Check Point, and concluded that Check Point was more user-friendly and easier to handle.

Manfrotto Group, a global leader in the creation, production, and distribution of professional support systems for the photography, video, and entertainment industries, faced a significant challenge in securing VPN access to their centralized data centers. The company's information systems were consolidated in Bassano del Grappa, where the main data center was equipped with approximately 50 servers. This architecture allowed all the business units within each brand to connect to a centralized data center to access administrative and financial systems. However, as the company grew, so did the demand for secure remote access to corporate resources. More than 25% of the employees in Italy were considered mobile users, and the trend was quickly catching on throughout the branch offices. The company needed a solution that could be centrally managed out of the data center while securing the new access to information and corporate resources for which users were asking.

Telecom Plus plc, a major British company and a leading provider of Internet and landline telecom, and gas and electric utility services in the UK, faced a significant challenge. The company's Utility Warehouse Discount Club needed a network that was completely safe from the threat posed by removable media devices. Many employees at Telecom Plus’ North London headquarters spent a large amount of time ‘hot-desking’ around the office as well as working remotely. This necessitated the use of removable USB devices to carry around large quantities of data. The challenge for the IT department was to ensure that the workforce was as flexible as possible without risking the security of the network, or the threat of data theft through USB flash drives and other removable media devices. A blanket ban on removable media devices would limit the company’s workforce flexibility, and create an air of distrust among employees. The only solution was to control the use of removable media devices and have total visibility of data coming in and out of the network.

Grupo VR, a Brazilian company that provides employee benefits in the form of debit cards, faced a significant challenge in ensuring the security and integrity of its confidential information. With a yearly revenue of $2 billion and employing more than 400 people across 12 branches in Brazil, the company had a considerable need for a safe and reliable connectivity infrastructure. The company's employees and third-party suppliers required substantial remote access to the company's systems. As the company evaluated remote-access solutions from several different companies, it sought a solution that would support its diverse requirements while minimizing the complexity of deploying and supporting remote access to applications. The solution also needed to ensure the security of the network for all types of remote-access scenarios.

Skipton Building Society, the seventh largest building society in the UK, faced a significant challenge in maintaining data integrity and security. In 1998, the society decided to upgrade its IT environment by replacing 'dumb' terminals connected to a mainframe environment with a network of desktop computers, many of which were connected to the internet. This move, while beneficial for operational efficiency, posed a significant security risk. The society needed a comprehensive security solution that could guard against the introduction of malicious code, unlicensed software programs, and unauthorized removable media devices. The solution also needed to maintain data integrity and prevent data theft, a critical requirement given the sensitive nature of the financial data the society handles.

Sooki Co., Ltd., a company specializing in rentals, sales, and repairs of survey and measurement devices, was expanding its business to include 3D application services for various industries. To ensure secure use of these applications by customers from plants, offices, and research centers, Sooki needed to install a unified threat management (UTM) appliance in its data center. The company also needed to provide a low-cost, integrated gateway security system, reduce operating overhead, and provision a uniform security environment for all customer locations. Furthermore, Sooki faced the challenge of constructing a network environment that would allow the construction site, JV office, and each general contractor location to access Sooki’s Tokyo data center via the Internet and use the application. The varying PC environments and inadequate equipment at some sites posed additional challenges.

British Car Auctions (BCA), Europe’s leading vehicle remarketing company, faced a significant challenge as it expanded its operations across Europe. With 14 centers in 9 different countries, BCA required a highly secure solution to provide its European sites with access to the financial systems and database hosted in the London data center. Additionally, BCA was in the process of developing a centralized auction system to replace the multiple independent applications being used across Europe. The challenge was to find a solution that could provide secure, reliable, and cost-effective network connections for multiple auction sites, ensuring high security, availability, and performance for transactions.

Southern Housing Group, a not-for-profit housing association in southeast England, was facing a persistent security problem. The organization, which has an extensive network of remote offices, was struggling with security management despite outsourcing it. Viruses and other intrusions were affecting network performance and user productivity. The Group's network included a head office, an operational center, four regional offices, and approximately 60 estate offices and temporary on-site project management offices. The number of remote locations fluctuated as projects were started and completed. The Group had a cost-effective site-to-site IP virtual private network (VPN) connecting all the locations. However, the dynamic environment and the extensive network made security management a significant challenge.

Symsoft AB, a telecommunications company, provides innovative services to operators, enabling them to offer subscribers new services such as multimedia messaging. With a small team of 60 employees, Symsoft has a global reach, installing its Java-based software on open servers shipped to customer locations across three continents. The company is obligated to provide 24-hour support for its customers, requiring them to log on to the Symsoft network and connect remotely to customer installations anywhere. This global reach and remote access to customer's real-time, mission-critical systems make security a vital concern. Compromised security could lead to significant revenue losses for a customer and potentially damage Symsoft's reputation. As a software developer, Symsoft also needs to protect its main asset—its source code—from theft or damage by network intruders.

Dakota Internet Partners, a leading Internet Service Provider (ISP) in southern Arizona, was seeking to provide its customers with value-added services that would give them a competitive edge. The company identified network security services as a logical extension of its existing business model. However, providing customers with a security solution was only the first piece of the puzzle. Dakota Internet Partners also required a solution that included a platform for managing numerous, geographically dispersed security appliances from a central location. The company needed to minimize up-front investment in IT infrastructure, provide centralized security management and service provisioning, and deploy seamless integration with existing back office and provisioning solutions.

The Equitable Bank, one of the largest consumer lenders in Wisconsin, faced a significant challenge in providing a network with enterprise-class performance and security across its 10 locations. With a limited budget and IT staff, the bank needed to ensure quick loan approvals and instant access to centralized information for its loan originators. Additionally, the bank had to comply with stringent state and federal laws regarding customer privacy and data security. The bank's existing slow frame relay network was not sufficient to meet these demands, and a more robust, secure, and efficient solution was required.

Miele, a globally recognized home appliances manufacturer, was in need of a comprehensive and reliable security solution that would uphold the company's reputation for quality. The company wanted to ensure secure access and transmission of company information across its offices. Until 2004, Miele's Nordic sales offices were connected via a dedicated Frame Relay network, which facilitated the secure transmission of crucial data. However, the company was seeking a more advanced solution that could offer additional flexibility when integrating third-party technologies.

Mobitel, a leading Slovenian mobile telecommunications operator, was facing a significant challenge in securing its high-volume Internet communications. The company's employees relied heavily on constant Internet communications, with large quantities of data being transferred to and from their mobile multimedia Web and WAP portal, Planet. The portal, which offers a variety of content and services, was frequented by thousands of unique visitors daily. Additionally, Mobitel's network hosted a popular WAP mobile messaging system, allowing users to access the Internet from their mobile phones. Due to the high volume of network communication and usage of multimedia services and messaging system, Mobitel was threatened by several thousand system and security breach attempts from the Internet each day. To prevent these breaches, Mobitel employed four perimeter firewalls to protect employees, services, remote users, and application-development environments. However, the existing firewall solution was nearing the end of its lifecycle and was no longer receiving critical business support from the vendor. Moreover, the legacy system relied on four separate firewall systems, requiring four separate management consoles.

The Judge Group, a professional services company, was facing a significant challenge with their aging intrusion protection system that could no longer be updated. This posed a significant risk to their revenue-generating business applications, which allow contractors to enter time and bill clients. The company needed a long-term security strategy that would not only protect these critical systems but also safeguard their reputation by preventing zero-day web attacks. The company operates from 35 offices and places 3,500 professionals annually, making the need for a robust, scalable, and easy-to-manage security solution even more critical.

The Superior Court of California, Orange County, faced a significant challenge in safeguarding court records from potential cyber attacks while ensuring secure remote access for authorized external agencies. The court, which operates in eight locations and employs 3,000 people, provides internet services to the public, the legal sector, and partner agencies. The challenge was to expand intrusion protection to all chokepoints without exceeding the budget. The court needed to protect the integrity of court records while allowing online access to a wide range of users. This responsibility included blocking malicious activity from external sources, providing broad coverage in protecting application vulnerabilities, and ensuring secure and reliable access to court records.

PharmaPartners, a key IT-infrastructure provider in the Netherlands' healthcare industry, faced a significant challenge in improving cooperation among medical professionals. Traditionally, doctors, pharmacists, physiotherapists, and other healthcare professionals worked within regional healthcare groups, each having their own separate online networks. These networks were secure but isolated, leading to little sharing of information with other healthcare professionals in neighboring cooperatives. This lack of information sharing had unintended consequences, such as increased administrative complexity when a patient needed to see a specialist outside their healthcare group. To address this, PharmaPartners developed the eHealth Information Concept, a system that links eHealthcare Groups via a rich GUI and a centralized electronic patient record system. However, this required a more secure network infrastructure, leading to the creation of eHealthNet.

Capital Securities Corporation, a leading player in Taiwan's competitive securities industry, was faced with the challenge of ensuring a secure environment for electronic transactions for its clients. As a company that prioritizes the management of clients' wealth, maintaining customer confidence was crucial to its success. The company needed to take every possible precaution to avoid any security breach, as most clients often overlooked the security risks associated with financial transactions. Capital Securities was in need of a cost-effective, all-in-one, reliable, and flexible Internet security and VPN solution that was easy to deploy and manage.

ENN Group, a clean energy company based in China, was facing significant challenges with its network security. The rapid growth in Internet traffic had increased the risk of network security breaches, and compromised PCs could easily spread attacks to other systems, causing extensive damage. ENN's outdated firewall lacked an effective blocking policy, and viruses and other attacks were not being effectively detected and blocked before infiltrating the ENN network. There was also concern about the reliance on a single firewall, which could become a single point of failure. If the firewall were to break down, there would be no efficient way to regain secure access to the Internet and VPN. Managing standalone firewalls was time-consuming and prone to error, and analyzing multiple firewall logs was difficult. Additionally, VPN access and performance were inconsistent, and VPN clients could not select the optimum link without manual intervention.

Embarcadero Technologies, a medium-sized technology company with a global presence, faced a significant challenge as it expanded its operations. The company's growth strategy involved acquiring small software development companies, which necessitated the need for a secure, efficient, and cost-effective Virtual Private Network (VPN). The goal was to connect geographically dispersed talent into flexible project teams to bring products to market quickly. However, as a mid-sized company, Embarcadero had a mid-sized budget for its IT infrastructure. The company needed a solution that would not only meet its security needs but also foster cross-site teamwork, enable efficient IT support, and be scalable enough to support further expansion.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), a comprehensive research-led university, faced a significant challenge in handling massive loads of data traffic across its campus network. With its data center growing exponentially, the university turned to virtualization to optimize its server and network resources, reduce costs, and save data center real estate. However, data center virtualization came with its own set of challenges, particularly concerning security. Legacy tools often did not provide the control and visibility needed to extend protection within virtual environments. The university needed a solution that could deliver security in a dynamic environment, inspect all traffic between various virtual machines, immediately and automatically apply protection when new virtual machines were created, and provide central administration to reduce management complexities.

Assefaz, a non-profit healthcare service provider in Brazil, was grappling with multiple challenges related to data security. The company was using various solutions from different vendors, leading to poor reliability, disparate management, and limited control. The complexity of their security solution was unsustainable and introduced multiple security challenges. Inefficient security tools and applications were unable to support Assefaz’s growing infrastructure. The company also lacked visibility into data traversing its network, posing data leakage and overall network security challenges. Limited control resulted in insufficient security management. Assefaz needed to instill customer confidence, protect personally identifiable information, and maintain PCI compliance as well as state and industry regulations.

Silverton Casino, a Las Vegas-based entertainment hub, faced significant challenges in protecting sensitive corporate data and maintaining PCI and internal security requirements. With a small IT staff, managing a complex environment efficiently was a daunting task. The casino operates in an environment where data integrity and confidentiality are paramount, and it needed to block malicious activity from external sources, ensure maximum data protection and preservation, protect business-critical assets and systems, and meet strict PCI compliance. The selection criteria for a solution included cost-effectiveness, ease-of-use, integrated security solution, and robust perimeter protection.

Ricoh New Zealand Ltd, a subsidiary of Ricoh Company, Ltd., Japan, was facing several challenges related to network security and productivity. With a small IT staff, the company was spending a significant amount of time manually reviewing logs to ensure its proxy servers were blocking access to certain applications and websites. The company needed to control employee access to social media sites and applications, protect against emerging Web 2.0 and other Internet threats, and increase employee productivity. Additionally, they were looking to minimize hardware expenses, safeguard sensitive customer and internal data, and reduce network security administration and management overhead. The company was also struggling with the complexity of managing a proxy server and the time-intensive manual administration it required.

Athens International Airport S.A. (AIA) was facing several challenges related to its IT security. With over 16 million passengers annually, the airport needed to safeguard customer data and airport systems from potential attacks. The airport was also looking to consolidate technologies to reduce complexity and improve productivity. Providing employees with secure and transparent remote access to corporate systems was another challenge. Additionally, AIA wanted to reduce IT security operating expenses. The airport also aimed to improve security through the consolidation of technologies and reduced management complexities, provide comprehensive protection on both the network and endpoints, enable a seamless user experience, and reduce costs associated with IT management overhead.

China South City Holdings Limited (CSCH), a leading developer and operator of large trading and logistics centers for industrial materials and commodities, was facing a number of challenges. The company was dealing with an increase in internal applications and large amounts of data flowing between its headquarters and branch offices. This posed new security challenges for the company and its network. The company needed to ensure secure and reliable communication between headquarters and branch offices, centralize security management, strengthen threat prevention functionality, and ensure system availability and business continuity. Additionally, CSCH was looking to increase employee productivity, reduce strain on network resources, provide secure communication between its headquarters and branch offices, and consolidate technologies to reduce management complexity.

Zhejiang Zhongda Futures Brokerage Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of the publicly listed Zhongda Group, faced several challenges in its operations. The company, which is a director of the Shanghai Futures Exchange and a member of several other commodity exchanges, had to deal with the proliferation of a mobile workforce. This situation posed significant security challenges on data protection and corporate network access. The growing number of mobile workers necessitated secure network access at all times and from any location. Additionally, the China Securities Regulatory Commission required all financial futures companies, including Zhongda, to adhere to strict data security guidelines for remote access. The company's corporate networks and endpoints contained vast amounts of sensitive data, necessitating a robust data security and business continuity plan to ensure customer confidence. Zhongda's complex mobile office security strategy required central management and remote maintenance to ensure consistent policy management, logging, monitoring, and event analysis.

Servicios Liverpool S.A. de C.V., the largest department store chain in Mexico, faced a significant challenge in enhancing customer transaction security and ensuring compliance with internal and external policies. The company was also striving to achieve business continuity while upgrading its security infrastructure. The challenge was further compounded by the need for a smooth, fast, and transparent migration to a new security infrastructure without compromising in-store sales. The company required a solution that would be fully compatible with its existing hardware and could handle high traffic volume, particularly during peak hours. Network latency was a critical concern, as even delays of less than a second could result in significant sales losses.

West Australian Newspapers Group, the leading media group in Western Australia, faced a significant challenge in maintaining PCI and internal security requirements in a deadline-driven environment. The group, which employs approximately 1,400 staff, needed to efficiently manage a complex network with a small IT staff. The key components for enforcing policies and tackling network security challenges were comprehensive protection, management, and reliability. The group also needed to meet strict PCI compliance within a large scale advertising sales call center, ensure maximum data protection and preservation, reduce management overhead while increasing the ability to centrally diagnose and fix network security issues, and provide centralized event correlation and management.

Bank Leumi Switzerland, an international private banking center for the Leumi Group, faced a significant challenge in upholding customer confidence and corporate reputation through data loss prevention of critical business and customer information. The bank, which manages the assets of over 4,500 clients in more than 80 countries, needed to ensure it met and exceeded government regulatory compliance standards while enforcing company security requirements. The bank was also tasked with proactively preventing data loss and instilling best practices by adding an additional layer of security to its communications policy. This included maintaining customer confidence and the bank's reputation, increasing visibility into the flow of external email traffic to further protect sensitive data, preventing the loss and distribution of confidential customer data, and thwarting unauthorized and potentially harmful communication practices.

Quala, a leading manufacturer of mass-market products in Latin America, faced a significant challenge in renovating and strengthening its security and telecommunications infrastructure. The company's internal communications were heavily reliant on the internet, including VoIP, video conferencing, business applications, collaboration tools, file transfer, and instant messaging. This reliance necessitated high-performance networks and a robust security strategy. The company aimed to strengthen its security perimeter to prevent unauthorized users from accessing the network, eliminate conventional telecommunications based on unsafe connections, reduce communication costs while increasing network capacity, and simplify the administration and monitoring of network events and incidents.