CRIF – Virtual Appliances and Software Blades

CRIF is a leading provider of added-value solutions and information services for the financial services industry to support decision-making and prevent fraud. Based in Italy, with a staff of approximately 1,450, CRIF offers its services to more than 1,900 financial institutions worldwide.

CRIF had undertaken an extensive virtualization project across its entire infrastructure, ultimately extended to the security layer with the following specific goals:

• Simplify IT security and management
• Reduce costs and streamline resource utilization
• Guarantee the highest reliability and an extensive protection of the network
• Gain comprehensive view over transactions and applications
• Future-proof security infrastructure with an eye on increasing virtualization

Check Point VSX Appliances to Match Security and Flexibility

CRIF has deployed four VSX appliances, running dozens of virtual firewall instances, to gain control over its new virtual infrastructure. Deployment has been carried out gradually, in order to meet the growing needs of the company, as well as the growing presence of virtualization within the enterprise. Aside the VSX appliances, CRIF also counts on five clusters of physical UTM-1 appliances, running a set of software blades, providing a comprehensive and flexible security solution for the whole network. Goal of the company is to gradually increase virtualization, in order to fully reap its management and economic benefits.

Centralized Control Eases Management, Increases Security

Centralized management is extremely important for CRIF, due to the highly confidential nature of the business-critical information that the company handles. Therefore, CRIF puts a great value on both real-time visibility over transactions and the ability to run a variety of analytics. The company deployed Eventia Log Analyzer to have a further level of management and control over data and information which run on the corporate network. Both real time and historical reports are now available to the IT staff for a more comprehensive visibility over the complete system.

Easier Management to Open New Development Perspectives

Through the virtualization of security, ongoing management has become significantly easier and more effective. Systems, application and transactions can be easily monitored for a single point of control, gaining an ongoing, comprehensive visibility over the complete infrastructure. This has allowed the IT staff to redistribute and streamline its available resources to focus on critical tasks: a Business Continuity project has been defined and deployed, in order to further increase system availability and to ensure operations also in case of technical failure.

Excellent Performance, Outstanding Reliability

• Security is paramount for a company whose core business is handling confidential information.
• “Through the years, we’ve been used to the highest levels of performance and reliability from Check Point.” —Carlo Romagnoli, Distributed IT Operations Manager, CRIF
• Check Point has helped CRIF to securely grow—up to a 1,200-strong server farm, mixing both virtual and physical machines.

Effective Resource Utilization

• Virtualized security has helped CRIF make a more effective use of available resources.
• Performance and reliability are guaranteed, management is easier and costs have been significantly reduced.
• “Check Point solutions never failed to meet our expectations.” —Romagnoli

Easy and Effective Unified Management

• Check Point allows for a unified management of both virtual and physical systems
• Transactions, systems and applications can be effectively monitored via a single console.
• Ongoing tasks have been significantly reduced: valuable time has been converted into more strategic activities and projects.