Testimonial - Systech Group Limited

The Company

Systech Group Limited is a global provider of specialist contracts, commercial management, quantity surveying, claims preparation and dispute resolution services. The Head Office is based in London and other UK offices include Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool. Offices internationally include Atlanta, Dubai and Singapore.

The Problem

An internal review of Systech's information security strategies concluded that new equipment, policies and procedures were urgently required.

The Solution

Solved.IT was commissioned to plan, design, install and support a new security platform that would provide Systech with robust, fast, secure and trustworthy access to systems both internally and remotely. There was also a requirement to link the offices together to allow seamless access to collaboration, intranet and data services.

Using a mixture of tried and tested SonicWALL and MailControl technology, Solved.IT delivered a truly secure, scalable and cost effective solution that has allowed Systech greater control over their systems and provided solid secure remote access solutions.

A range of SonicWALL PRO series devices were deployed, including PRO 5060, PRO 4060 and PRO 3060 devices running gateway Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware and Intrusion Detection services at each office. These devices provided virtual private networking tunnels between offices and a mesh VPN was created. This further allowed the offices to share data and collaboration services such as Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. It also opened up great opportunities for business resumption and continuity planning.

SonicWALL CDP (Continuous Data Protection) devices were installed in each office to provide immediate tapeless backup of all desktop, laptop and servers on the network. To assist with Systech's disaster recovery planning, the devices were set to copy data from local to remote devices. Bare metal recovery was installed for the critical servers so that in the event of a disaster, the server would be restored without the need of installing the operating system, updates, various programs, updates to programs etc. The whole process of recovery is estimated at over 400% quicker that previously.

To allow Systech employees secure remote access, SonicWALL SSL-VPN 2000 units were deployed. The devices were linked to the Systech active directory and allow each user to login to their own portal granting them secure Outlook Web Access, Intranet capabilities and SharePoint Portal Services.

Using the SonicWALL NetExtender application, each user can also connect back to their home server and email services without logging into the website.

With the combined SonicWALL technology, when the user connects using NetExtender any files that have been changed "offline" are immediately backed up to the CDP device, providing further disaster recovery abilities.

As part of the overall security plan, Websense MailControl was chosen as the preferred method of email scanning for viruses and spam. All Systech email is routed via MailControl servers geographically placed and a new second email server outside of the Systech London office to form part of the overall disaster recovery plan.