ARSAT upgrades from Cisco to Check Point in record time.

“Check Point R80 SmartMove enabled us to achieve a successful, extremely fast security deployment for a customer across their sites worldwide. Check Point APIs are the star of the solution, enabling us to orchestrate complex migration processes and move the customer to their new solution faster. These functionalities allowed us to migrate and deploy each of the involved firewalls in 33 minutes average instead of 27 hours.”
– Federico Meiners, Cybersecurity Architect, Tecsystem

Overview

ARSAT
Empresa Argentina de Soluciones Satelitales Sociedad Anónima (ARSAT) is one of the largest ISPs and data center companies in Argentina, the company is dedicated to providing the highest quality telecommunications services for its customers.

Tecsystem
For more than 10 years, Tecsystem has been a leading provider of technology solutions. Headquartered in Buenos Aires, this customer-centric organization focuses on delivering innovative cybersecurity and IT infrastructure solutions.

Evant.io
Evant.io is dedicated to providing high end cybersecurity services to companies across Latin America across different industries such as Government, Oil & Gas, Financial Services, Banking,and more. Check Point is a main focus for them since it allows Evant to solve complex cybersecurity needs and provide top quality cybersecurity architectures.

Business Challenge

Securing a Major Telecommunications Provider, ARSAT
ARSAT recently approached Tecsystem in conjunction with Evant.io to help them upgrade their security to ensure the best security for today’s advanced GenV threats. Its existing Cisco firewalls were resource-intensive, with excessive memory consumption and frequent crashes.

“ARSAT’s existing firewalls lacked robust threat prevention, and were difficult to manage,” said Federico Meiners, Cybersecurity Architect, at Tecsystem. “The customer has a massive environment with more than 300 types of technologies, handling all kinds of ISP traffic. We needed a solution that would deliver advanced threat prevention, backed by unified, automated management for in-depth visibility into our customer’s environment.”

Solution

Automating Migration and Achieving Visibility for Management
After considering competitive solutions from Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Cisco, ARSAT deployed Check Point Quantum Security Gateways with Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), Antibot, and Antivirus software technologies. These next-generation appliances combine comprehensive security protections with high performance, to safeguard enterprise and data center networks. To provide an additional layer of network threat prevention and extraction that ARSAT required, Tecsystem also deployed Check Point Sandblast Network.

“The customer chose Check Point for their amazing threat prevention technology, and because they had had a good prior experience with Check Point,” said Meiners. “Its technologies provide protection even against Fifth-Generation cyber attacks.”

Tecsystem and Evant.io worked together migrated 60 virtual firewalls to its new solution, moving from 40,000 policy rules to 6,000 on the Check Point solution, and optimizing operations by 90 percent. To manage the solution, Tecsystem deployed R80, which provides centralized management for both physical and virtual networks. With more than 100 new features in its release, R80.30 consolidates every aspect of ARSAT’s security environment. A customizable dashboard provides full visibility across the network, enabling IT to focus on strategic issues by decreasing troubleshooting and time required for day to day tasks.

Results

Accelerating Migration and Increasing Insight
ARSAT could not afford downtime on its infrastructure, so Tecsystem sought to streamline and accelerate the migration to its customer’s new solution. With Check Point R80 Unified Security management, the company was able to quickly migrate existing security policies to the new solution.

“We managed to automate 70 percent of the migration process, using the Check Point SmartMove tool in R80 to migrate all the rules from the Cisco firewalls to the Check Point solution,” said Meiners. “We also developed a custom solution that utilized APIs to translate all the interface configurations to the Check Point Virtual System Extension (VSX). Our Check Point tools and APIs enabled us to migrate each system to the new environment in just 33 minutes, which was amazing. It used to take approximately 27 hours to migrate a system manually.”

Check Point R80 gives ARSAT insight and control over its customer’s entire cybersecurity environment, all from a single unified dashboard that simplifies management and troubleshooting.

“We have a holistic view of all the Check Point deployments, and we can correlate logs more easily,” said Meiners. “In the past, customers had to utilize many different solutions to monitor policies, which made administration slow. Now, customers can control all their policies via a single pain of glass that’s easy to manage. Our customers get real value from these capabilities.”

With a flexible Check Point solution in place, supported by complete, unified management, ArSat can continue to keep pace with changing business requirements and evolving security threats for years to come.