Scotland’s Perth & Kinross Council Selects Enterasys to Secure IP Telephony Deployment
When Perth & Kinross Council, an Enterasys customer of more than 20 years, decided to completely upgrade its voice infrastructure with IP telephony, they chose Enterasys to ensure reliable performance – their main objective. They needed a way to proactively protect their voice, video, and data services from internal threats, and Enterasys’ identity-based approach based on user authentication was a perfect fit and leveraged their existing infrastructure investments.
Perth & Kinross Council is the local administrative and government council for the Perth & Kinross area of Scotland, responsible, among other things, for maintaining area nurseries, schools, refuse collection, town planning, social services, and economic development. The Council’s network operations personnel support 300 network devices, connecting more than 3,000 government employees.
The Enterasys Secure Networks for VoIP solution will help Perth & Kinross Council prioritize and secure network traffic associated with the deployment of its new IP telephony and power over Ethernet (PoE) upgrade. Enterasys Matrix® switches, Dragon® distributed intrusion prevention, and NetSight® Automated Security Manager software will help protect information assets among 50 remote government, education, and institutional sites — dispersed over 600 square miles.
Although the network infrastructure contains multiple vendors – including 3Com, Cisco, Enterasys, and Juniper – it was the proven track record of the Enterasys products and technical support team that made a lasting impression on the Council when they considered the new IP telephony upgrade.
“Enterasys makes great efforts to look after products once they’re installed and they constantly ensure backward compatibility. Their products have always been reliable to configure and operate,” said Rupert Carpenter-Jacobs, IST Engineer, Perth & Kinross Council. “We hear mixed reviews about other industry vendors who shout a lot but don’t deliver as much.”
To protect the new IP telephony system, the IST team selected NetSight Automated Security Manager to automate threat containment — blocking and quarantining the attack — without disrupting the government applications. In addition, Enterasys’ Dragon IDS/IPS system will further enhance IT security by leveraging thousands of vulnerability and exploit-based signatures within its built-in threat library, as a basis of automated defense.
“Enterasys has a history with the Council of delivering well thought out, easy-to-use network solutions that are flexible and can adapt to any changes in complexity that develop in the course of conducting government business,” said Rupert Carpenter-Jacobs. “The Enterasys products work every day and that’s just the way it should be.”
