Secure Symphony

Sonata Software, a $77 mn IT consulting and

software services company, is headquartered in Bangalore with offices in the US,

UK, Germany and Singapore. Its clients include Franklin Templeton, Deutsche

Bank, Provimi, Gupta Technologies and others, and the company has strategic

alliances with Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.

In India, the company has three development centers in

Bangalore, and one at Hyderabad. The headquarter in Bangalore, housing a data

center and a development center, connects to the other two development centers

in the city via wireless technologies. The Hyderabad development center is

connected to the Bangalore facilities through leased lines and other offices in

India connect to headquarters through Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

“Being a software development company, Sonata considers

the security of its intellectual property as top priority and overall

information security is of paramount importance,” says VC Sekhar, senior

manager (IT) for Sonata Software. “We have had incidents of virus attacks on

our networks, and spyware has become a significant nuisance.

Spamming was also a major issue as we received no less than 40,000 mails

a day. Something had to be done.”

The challenge of protecting such as extensive and

geographically dispersed network was complicated by the number of workstations

and servers that Sonata had at the various facilities in India. The headquarters

in Bangalore had about 650 workstations and 30 servers, hosting mission-critical

applications such as mail and DNS services, as well as the company Intranet. The

other two development centers in Bangalore had about 800 workstations between

them, and there are up to 150 workstations and 10 servers in Hyderabad.

Sonata evaluated solutions from several vendors besides

Fortinet including Cisco and Symantec. “We eventually chose Fortinet because

of its integrated security approach. With the number of servers, workstations

and facilities we needed a solution that was easy to manage and would not take

up too much time and resources which may be needed elsewhere,” informs Harish

Kumar, Network Administrator, Sonata Software.

Sonata deployed an anti-virus firewall at the headquarters

facility in Bangalore, and other appliances at the other two development

facilities in Bangalore and at Hyderabad office. All the security platforms were

deployed at the network edge, securing the infrastructure of the organization

from the computer and network threats outside. The antivirus, firewall and IPS

(intrusion prevention system) capabilities are being utilized, along with

Network Address Translation (NAT).

Explains Kumar, “We have a two-layer security setup: the

integrated security appliances are deployed at the gateway level, and we have

deployed security solutions at a second level as well. We have found that the

product catches about 80 to 85 percent of viruses and malicious code.”

“We needed a solution that would not affect the

performance of our network. The fact that the deployed platforms had ASIC-based

hardware acceleration assured us that the product would not create bandwidth

bottlenecks,” continued Kumar.

The IT staff at Sonata were particularly impressed with the

ease of setting up VPN connections. “The user friendly GUI made it very easy

to deploy and manage our corporate VPN,” says Kumar. “The product also

permits us to connect to two ISPs at the same time. This extra level of

redundancy on the same appliance isimportant for people in our business, where

staying connected is a high priority,” says Sekhar. Sonata also has

Fortinet's FortiGuard Subscription Service that provides continuous automated

push updates of the latest virus signatures and countermeasures against the

latest computer and network threats.

Team DQ



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