Low Cost Airline Takes Cloud Security to New Heights with Check Point

Low Cost Airline

From America’s favorite small cities to world-class destinations, this airline makes leisure travel affordable and convenient.

On Board for Virtualization

This airline focuses on delivering affordable air travel while also offering related products, such as hotel rooms and rental cars. With 85 aircraft and 350 scheduled routes across the United States, this low cost airline flies out of 120 airports. Across all of these airports, this airline’s IT and information security teams manage network traffic for business-critical systems such as reservations and flight schedules.

In the past, the airline had supplied laptops for staff and deployed physical firewalls at each of their locations. Because traffic was shared over a common network, any security or network problem at one airport could potentially affect all locations. The infrastructure also was costly and difficult to manage consistently. As the threat landscape intensified, the airline’s team wanted to simplify their network design as well as bring more automation into their releases while increasing their ability to prevent attacks across an increasingly virtualized infrastructure.

The airline chose to deploy VMware NSX in their datacenter and implement a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) delivered over Internet links to all airports. This dramatically simplified network management, delivered greater agility, and enabled the team to micro-segment traffic with policies specific to each segment for higher resiliency. To secure this dynamic environment, the airline chose Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for VMware NSX.

Extending Protection for Virtual Coverage

“We’ve implemented the Check Point architecture to help us consolidate and unify security across our networks,” said the airline’s Information Security Manager. “In addition to Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for NSX, it includes Check Point firewalls, Check Point Harmony Endpoint, and Check Point R80 Security Management. Together, these solutions have made our lives much easier and our network more secure.”

Check Point  uses unified threat intelligence and open interfaces to protect the airline’s environments against targeted attacks. With Check Point R80 Security Management, the team consolidated security management across all network environments into a single pane of glass. Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for VMware NSX delivers a multi-layered defensive posture to protect east-west traffic in their VMware-deployed datacenters. CloudGuard Network Security transparently enforces security at the hypervisor level and between virtual machines, automatically quarantines infected machines for remediation, and provides comprehensive visibility into all virtual network traffic trends and threats.

Automated Protection, Tailored Policies

When the airline deployed Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for VMware NSX to secure its VDI environment, Check Point network protection was extended to the new infrastructure. The VDI environment’s micro-segments now enable the team to contain any service-affecting problem to only one airport. And they can now micro-segment consistently with micro-permissions from Check Point CloudGuard Network Security and the R80 management platform.

“Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for NSX gave us advanced protection for our eastwest data traffic between virtual machines,” said the Information Security Manager. “It automatically provisions services as our virtual machines move, making it simple to achieve consistent security everywhere. For instance, at one airport, Check Point stopped a ransomware attack on our network that disabled a major courier services delivery company.”