Exceeding Expectations

The rapid pace of technological change continues to impose demanding IT infrastructure and solution requirements on businesses. In the effort to remain competitive, greater pressure has been placed on companies to outsource their IT needs while focusing on core competencies.

TCC Technology (TCCT) is a total technology infrastructure and information services provider who understands the great importance of business continuity and failsafe infrastructure needs.

TCCT provides both Infrastructure Services and Business Solutions to meet all customer IT requirements with an emphasis on timeliness, cost-effectiveness, suitability to customer needs, and most importantly, superior quality of service.

As one of the largest business conglomerates in Thailand, TCCT's reputation relies on its ability to provide high availability infrastructure services through its Data Center and its assurance that the mission critical business solutions it provides are protected against all possible security threats, as well as ensuring that access is available at all times.

Performance

As their number of customers grew and network traffic increased, it became apparent to TCCT that they needed a more robust firewall solution to reinforce their security defense, one which would be able to handle the high volumes of traffic and maintain the company's promise of a high service commitment level.

"The most outstanding features of StoneGate for us are its clustering and high performance capabilities. It is able to offer high throughput performance similar to other firewall solutions, which were running on more expensive platforms. StoneGate's reliability exceeded our initial expectations", explains Mr. Arun Khotchaosot, Network Manager at TCCT.

During the product evaluation process carried out by TCCT, Stonesoft's StoneGate™ was able to demonstrate its stability while handling a consistent high volume of traffic. Other firewall performance tests conducted have also shown that StoneGate provides an excellent price per performance ratio. Able to run on inexpensive, off-the-shelf Intel-based PC server hardware, StoneGate provides better than gigabit performance, and exceptional frames per second throughput.

StoneGate includes several advanced technologies, which contribute to its outstanding performance including: Multi-Layer Inspection technology with advanced high-performance algorithms for firewall filtering and packet handling, a streamlined and hardened operating system designed for firewall use and support for advanced hardware features such as symmetric multi-processing.

Ease of management

One of the key concerns, expressed by Mr. Khotchaosot, was the time and resources required to manage a number of different security solutions from different vendors including system upgrades and compatibility issues between the products. The time and resources occupied with only maintenance work could be better deployed to other critical functions.

The StoneGate platform has been designed to reduce the complexity of managing multi-vendor solutions by providing a firewall, operating system, load balancing and high availability in a single application. StoneGate solution architecture allows the management of the whole security infrastructure, from the operating system-level configuration to remote software upgrades from a single location.

"StoneGate's Management Center is convenient to use and is much easier to configure, compared to other leading firewall solutions", observes Mr. Khotchaosot. "Also because the StoneGate solution comprises a high availability firewall, Multi-Link VPN and operating system all-in-one, we spend less time managing patches, different versions of software from different vendors and allow valuable technical resources to be deployed in other critical IT functions."

With the advent of Drop-In Firewall Clustering (DFC), StoneGate has made administration even easier by eliminating complex configuration requirements for clustered firewalls, enabling security administrators to effectively "drop" a firewall cluster into their existing network infrastructure without any additional reconfiguring of existing switches or routers.

ROI/cost savings

"With another solution on proprietary or Unix platforms, we would have paid more also for the maintenance of these platforms. Even with 24x7 support on the Intel platform, it is cheaper to maintain. With StoneGate our return on investment is 20 % faster than it would have been with the other solutions tested..."

Mr. Arun Khotchaosot, Network Manager at TCCT

Mr. Khotchaosot is convinced that an added benefit of the StoneGate platform is that, in terms of ROI, it offers the best price per performance out of those tested. "As a software appliance, StoneGate can be deployed on any cost-effective Intel-based hardware, not only assisting us in standardizing our hardware platform, but also allowing us to realize a return on investment of our existing hardware. This in turn has enabled us to avoid buying expensive Unix or proprietary platforms so we have already saved more than 50% in the hardware investment."

TCC Technology have already plans to add data centers to meet the growing customer demand for their services.

"StoneGate firewall is our preferred solution for our future needs of firewall and VPN" says Mr. Khotchaosot.

About TCC Technology

Founded in 2001 as part of the Thai Charoen Commercial (TCC) Group, TCC Technology (TCCT) is an IT service provider company with a registered capital of THB 120 million. In March 2003, Berli Jucker, recognizing the growing IT outsourcing trend, became TCCT's major shareholder with a 51% share. In early of 2004, TCCT aggressively expanded its business by acquiring a second Data Center in Bangna Trad area. TCCT's main business focus is providing Enterprise IT implementation and Managed Hosting services.

TCCT's first Data Center is strategically located in Bangkok's central business district. The Empire Tower Data Center (ETDC) has a hosting space of 200 sq.m. to accommodate 100 racks and an additional 160 sq.m. designed for supporting operations. TCCT's second Data Center is situated just on the outskirts of Bangkok. The Bangna Trad Data Center (BNDC) has approximately 800-sq.m. of hosting area with a modern state-of-the-art facility designed for mission-critical applications. Both Data Centers offer world-class features that provide carrier-class availability and redundancy in all power, communications, and security systems.