Case Study: Red Folder
Red Folder Gains a Competitive Edge with StoneGate
Founded in 2001, Red Folder got its start by providing software development and integration services for organizations ranging from small- to medium-sized businesses to Fortune 100 companies, like American Express. The company quickly expanded into managed Web and e-mail hosting services, and last year they began offering managed security services.Since its inception, Red Folder has been doubling its business each year. However, in order to keep pace with rapid growth and support the specific needs of its growing customer base Red Folder needed to get the right technology infrastructure in place.
"One of our biggest customers had very stringent security requirements for Web sites that house sensitive data," said Ron Peters, President and Founder of Red Folder.
In order to adhere to these requirements we had to start building up an infrastructure that could ensure reliable, secure, flexible networking. As a result, now we’re providing support for an increasing number of companies that want to use our infrastructure instead of trying to replicate it on their own.”
Building for the Future and Reducing TCO
When Red Folder began researching infrastructure options they took a forward-thinking approach
to anticipating its technology needs as the business continued to expand.
Red Folder evaluated several technology solutions, but found that many were too cost-prohibitive and unwieldy for their business model. In addition, everything they wanted in a complete solution was an add-on, which ended up doubling, tripling and even quadrupling the price.
“Our customers come to us because they can’t afford their own IT infrastructure or personnel, so looking for the options that offered the best technology and the best total cost of ownership that we could pass along to them became extremely important,” explained Peters.
“We needed a solution that offered the right balance of advanced security, scalability and price.”
Unified Management Enables Responsiveness to Customer Needs
Red Folder selected Stonesoft since they could offer the StoneGate Platform – a comprehensive solution that allows companies to manage their firewalls, VPNs, and IDS/IPS using Stonesoft’s Management Center.Since we were working with a prominent credit card services organization, we knew hackers were scanning our system, but the minute we turned on Stonesoft’s solution it was like turning on a light switch. Immediately we had analysis and reports that provided clear details of who and what was trying to access our network, which enabled us to diffuse potential threats ahead of time.”
Ron Peters, President and Founder of Red Folder
Stonesoft’s Management Center is a centralized management system designed with an easy-to-use GUI interface that simplifies administrator and rolebased functions. It also unifies incoming and outgoing communications circuits, firewalls, VPN, and IPS.
“With the Management Center we’re prepared keep pace with our customers’ changing technology requirements and support distributed networks from a single console,” said Peters. In addition, with the integrated report tool, incident manager, audit manager, and logging, Red Folder can easily extract and customize reports that their customers need to meet specific compliance requirements.
Stonesoft Delivers High Availability, Flexibility, Ongoing Support
With the StoneGate solution Red Folder can adapt to changing maintenance windows while ensuring its customers of high availability.With StoneGate, we know we can react quickly – whether it’s 12 in the afternoon or 12 at night – and know that everything will fail over correctly. We’ve had to react to last-minute requests a few times and the system has worked great.”Another benefit of the solution is its architectural modularity that allows Red Folder to tailor the solution exactly how and when they want to deploy different capabilities. Red Folder can also continue to add new technologies to expand its offering without the need to learn a new set of tools or a whole new product suite. For instance, the company just began piloting mobile VPNs as a service. Red Folder also knows that they have a vendor they can count on for the long-term.
Ron Peters, President and Founder of Red Folder.
“When we need assistance, Stonesoft’s tech support responds with intelligent answers. It’s refreshing,” said Peters. “The engineering team is very responsive and works with us to ensure that existing features run properly. They also ask for our feedback, so they can improve functionality for the next updated release.”
Bottom line – with Stonesoft and the StoneGate solution we know that we’re positioned to keep growing our business and stay ahead of the technology curve."
Ron Peters, President and Founder of Red Folder
About Red Folder
Red Folder was founded to help companies of all sizes bring enterprise-class technology to achieve their strategic objectives. From managed email and security services to High Performance Computing, Red Folder provides superior technology management services and unique hardware solutions to a wide range of customers.Most companies do not have all the technology expertise or staff they need. Red Folder helps customers identify their business goals and exceed them through process excellence, quality assurance, continuous monitoring, and dedicated support.
Based in Southern California, Red Folder offers hands-on expertise and on-site management, in addition to remote management services and technology implementation consulting.
