Cambridge Regional College SonicWALL Case Study

December 2010

Cambridge Regional College recently engaged with Solved IT to upgrad to the SonicWALL E-Class Network Security Appliance (NSA) E6500 and Continuous Data Protection (CDP) 6080 solution to better support its growing network.

Acting on the advice of Vinny Booth of Solved.IT, Les Black, Head of Communications & IT at Cambridge Regional College, agreed to become a SonicWALL Case Study:

Incorporated in 1993, Cambridge Regional College (CRC) is a College of Further Education
located in Cambridge, England. One of the largest colleges in the eastern region, CRC offers
one of the most modern and technologically advanced experiences in further education in
the United Kingdom.

The challenge: the changing security needs of a growing college
The college currently employs 700 staff members supporting more than 4,000 full-time and
6,000 part-time students, and has recently completed an extensive £23 million campus
redevelopment. CRC has grown significantly over the past decade, and so have its needs
for network security. Previously, CRC used a Cisco® PIX® firewall, but decided it needed to
be upgraded. Les Black, head of communications & IT at Cambridge Regional College,
visited Comdec in Las Vegas back in 2004. After an extensive evaluation, the college
selected the SonicWALL® PRO 5060 that was upgraded to the E-Class Network Security
Appliance (NSA) E6500 solution in 2010.

“By our criteria, we found that SonicWALL offered a far easier management, as well as more
security features on a single appliance for a lower cost compared to Cisco,” said Les Black.

As the network grew, the need for efficient and reliable backup and recovery became even
more apparent. Upon migrating from a Novell® to a Microsoft® networking environment,
CRC re-evaluated its tape backup system and chose to replace it with a SonicWALL
Continuous Data Protection (CDP) 6080 solution.

“We never felt fully safe and secure with tape,” said Les Black.

The solution: SonicWALL E-Class NSA E6500 and CDP 6080
CRC has deployed two E-Class NSA E6500 firewalls in High Availability (HA) mode. The
E6500 cluster also manages a redundant Internet link for the College. E6500 Next-Generation
Firewalls scale to the needs of expanding enterprises like CRC. Combining SonicWALL
Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection™ (RFDPI) with a multi-core platform, the E6500 is
configurable to analyse and control thousands of unique applications, whether unencrypted
or encrypted with SSL.

CRC runs the SonicWALL Comprehensive Gateway Security Suite (CGSS) over the E6500
appliance. CGSS includes Gateway Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, Intrusion Prevention. It also
features capabilities like Application Intelligence and Control, Content Filtering Service,
ViewPoint™ Reporting Software and 24x7 technical support. In addition, the College has
established a SonicWALL Clean Wireless™ environment by filtering and controlling
incoming students’ wireless LAN (WLAN) traffic through the E6500 solution. The College
has also established a SonicWALL Clean VPN™ by leveraging the integrated SSL VPN
functionality of the E6500 to provide secure remote access to senior managers and IT staff.

For backup and recovery, the CDP 6080 is ideal for medium-sized organizations like CRC
that demand higher performance and larger capacity. It offers automatic disk-based backup
and recovery for multiple workstations and server applications. The low-touch CDP 6080
automatically enforces policy-driven, user-transparent backups of multiple versions of files
and applications—including Exchange and SQL databases. The CDP 6080 offers flexible
disaster recovery options for local archiving, offsite data backup, site-to-site data backup, and
system recovery of entire systems onto original, virtual or new Windows® or Linux® devices.

The results: high performance and reliability
CRC is using E6500 security features such as Intrusion Prevention and Application Intelligence
and Control to make its network more efficient and secure and reclaim valuable bandwidth. For
example, it can now block peer-to-peer attacks such as Kazaa, allow access to Facebook while
blocking Facebook Chat, filter Google images search results based on College policy and
selectively permit access to YouTube and BBC iPlayer for student research.

“Using high availability to eliminate single point of failure for network security is great,
particularly for crucial resources such as email delivery and online exams,” said Black.

A key benefit to the E6500 has been high performance. CRC has yet to find the need to operate
the E6500 appliances at full capacity. During the 2010 Football World Cup, for example, the
appliances were easily coping with traffic volumes of 99.6 Mbps.

CRC uses the CDP 6080 to backup eight Windows and SQL servers supporting mission-critical
university services.

“With tape, it would take us three hours to recover kilobytes,” said Black. “Recently, we recovered
several gigabytes of lost data in a few minutes, with just a few clicks. Now we ask users what
version they want restored.”

The CDP 6080 has brought Les Black peace of mind, “I no longer worry about backups, like I did
with tape — even over the weekends.”

Last but not least, SonicWALL’s customer support contributes to the overall satisfaction with the
deployment: “We feel more secure and supported with SonicWALL service,” comments Black.