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Cutting the Clutter
Preserving its investment in best-of-breed firewall software from Check Point was a key consideration when CheckFree decided to replace its complex firewall architecture with UTMs in 2003.
"We were not going to throw away all that investment in [Check Point] expertise and licensing," says Isenberg.
The company tested several hardware platforms running Check Point firewall software and chose Crossbeam's X-Series.
"We wanted to re-engineer our firewall and IPS infrastructure to meet availability needs and future growth. We wanted a platform that would be highly available, cost effective and easy to manage," says Isenberg. "And we wanted to increase capacity and scalability while decreasing operational cost and complexity."
A UTM allowed CheckFree to do more with less, but an appliance designed for small offices wasn't going to cut it.
"When you're aggregating security, you need a lot more horsepower. With UTM, if hardware fails and you didn't pick a platform that's resilient, your whole network will fail."
CheckFree chose a UTM blade server for growth and availability. "When we need more horsepower, we just add another blade. If a module fails, a spare blade will come up as any module in our architecture," Isenberg says.
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