Unitel strengthens protection of critical infrastructure with Check Point

“You cannot protect what you cannot see. Check Point gives us visibility into our infrastructure.”
— Dialungana Malungo, Cybersecurity Analyst, Unitel

Overview

Unitel
Unitel is a mobile telecoms and Internet provider with a 70% share of the Angolan market. The company plans to extend coverage across the entire country by 2022 with a roll-out of 4G to Angola’s major cities.

Business Challenge

Protecting critical infrastructure
Unitel holds a large amount of personal and financial data of the citizens of Angola. A disruption or breach of Unitel would cause a major disruption to the Angolan economy.

“We have to protect our infrastructure and our data,” says Dialungana Malungo, Cybersecurity Analyst, Unitel. “We have to have the right technical security controls, but we also play a role in educating our staff and the wider Angolan economy about cyber threats. Our priority is to protect our clients.”

Solution

A unified approach to security
Unitel favors a unified, consolidated approach to security management.

“We are the largest telecommunications company in Angola, with a huge infrastructure and a broad perimeter. Having different solutions with different vendors would cause an unnecessary headache,” says Malungo. “Check Point is committed to security.”

The Check Point architecture is a fully consolidated cyber security architecture that provides unprecedented protection against sophisticated and targeted Gen V mega cyber-attacks. The architecture is designed to resolve the complexities of growing connectivity and inefficient security, working across all networks, endpoint, cloud and mobile.

Unitel also deployed Check Point Next Generation Threat Prevention augmented with SandBlast Threat Emulation (sandboxing) and IPS (Intrusion Prevention System). Remote users are seamlessly connected over Check Point Virtual Private Networks (VPN). The overall solution provides users with seamless and secure access to the corporate networks.

“Different Check Point solutions protect different perimeters on our network,” Malungo explains. “We do pre and post-detection with threat prevention to make sure we’re able to prevent the threats right there. We also have IPS to detect anomalies on our network.”

Benefits

Central management, total visibility

With Check Point, Unitel manages its entire infrastructure from one, centralized security management platform.

“Check Point allows us to see what is happening in the infrastructure and to then configure our devices from a centralized platform,” says Malungo. “You cannot protect what you cannot see. Check Point gives us visibility into our infrastructure.”

Unitel is now able to better manage remote users and create granular security rules for different user groups.

Unified threat management, he continues, is more cost effective, easier to manage and more secure. “Because all elements are connected, upgrades are simpler and more consistent. When we upgrade, everything remains stable.”

Check Point Support is also cause for praise. “If we should have a problem, Check Point is there. Peace of mind is valuable when it comes to security,” says Malungo. He says Check Point protects today and provides assurance for tomorrow.

“Check Point protects our organization not only against the well-known attacks, but also the zero-day attacks. With Check Point, we’re confident we can protect ourselves against emerging cyber security attacks.”