Protecting sensitive data for six million residents in Region Lazio, Italy

“With Check Point we have managed to intercept a lot of attacks. When we experienced a phishing attempt, Check Point prevented it from entering our environment and causing damage.”
– Simone Ciotti, Network Specialist, LAZIOCrea SpA

Overview

LAZIOCrea SpA
LAZIOCrea SpA is responsible for dealing with all of IT for Italy’s Lazio region. It develops regional information systems, streamlines internal processes and creates solutions that reduce public spending. The organization also supports essential services such as health emergencies and civil protection.

Business Challenge

Protecting Italy’s second largest region
Data security is essential to LAZIOCrea; it needs to protect the sensitive information of nearly six million residents. To comply with changing rules imposed by the Government, the organization must frequently update its security policies.

The company’s security encompasses five datacentres. Three of the datacentres deal with public administration services and the other two are concerned with business continuity and disaster recovery.

It was crucial for LAZIOCrea to aquire security solutions that would not only be easy to use, implement and manage, but also provide complete prevention from cyber attacks, including virus intrusions and phishing attacks, and protect all the company’s critical assets.

Solution

Delivering granular visibility on security
LAZIOCrea chose Check Point formost for its management capabilities along with it’s ease-of-use and the granular visibility provided by its Identity Awareness solution.

LAZIOCrea runs two Check Point clusters with a Smart-1 5050 security management appliance; one cluster with a Check Point 15600 firewall and the other with Check Point 12600 firewall. The Smart-1 5050 solutions are connected to two XL clusters, one for web browsing and the other dedicated to local health authorities and hospitals.

One blade delivers firewall services and the second blade provides both anti-virus and firewall services. Implementation was facilitated with Check Point SmartMove making it easy to migrate a security database. With Check Point SmartEvent, LAZIOCrea can consolidate all access logs into one single view and gain full threat visibility into their entire environment.

Results

Providing a consolidated view of access logs
Check Point provides a single access point to manage both of LAZIOCrea’s clusters at the same time without the need to access and manage firewalls. As many people are now able to work together, management and log reading times has been massively reduced which in turn increases productivity.

After reviewing various solutions in the security market, for LAZIOCrea, Check Point’s Identity Awareness proved to be the most secure solution with the fewest flaws, enabling LAZIOCrea to significantly improve their security posture.

“Thanks to Check Point we have managed to intercept a lot of attempted attacks,” says Simone Ciotti, Network Specialist at LAZIOCrea.” We had a phishing attempt by an external service and Check Point managed to block the domain, intercept it and keep it away from the majority of clients.”

Additionally, one of LAZIOCrea’s most important responsibilities, managing hospital services, has been streamlined because of the improved connection to the database with the Check Point solutions.

“Everything to do with our Check Point implementation was easy thanks to SmartMove. We have also found that SmartEvent is an essential application for us because it brings together all the access logs. Having accurate logs is essential for a service like public administration,” concludes Ciotti.