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Cegedim chooses Stonesoft’s solution for securing its network

Besides a reinforced security policy, StoneGate of Stonesoft offers fast ROI as well as reduced management costs

Cegedim, a European leader in production, operations, data channelling and services related to medical information and CRM activities, was created in 1969. Cegedim is present in more than 60 countries, over 5 continents. The company is currently consulted by the most prominent laboratories. The company is structured according to two divisions:

• Health and strategic data
• Technologies and services.

Within the renewal of its centralized security platform, Cegedim has consulted the major centralized security solution providers on the market. The goal was to find a solution implementing numerous firewalls in the core of networks dedicated to protect the entire computing infrastructure against all attacks or internal and external intrusion threats. The new solution had to imperatively respect a certain number of conditions and provide the following functionalities: high performance, centralized management, advanced clustering functions, and consequently high availability, as well as easy-to-manage installation.

To select the most efficient solution, Cegedim has established different selection criteria and test stages. Those different tests and benchmarks took place over a period of time of approximately 2 years up to final decision-making and selected product implementation at the beginning of 2005. The different tests have been highly elaborated to valid the high quality and performance of the different solutions suggested.

Award-winning Stonesoft has succeeded in passing all the different selection steps, in particular that of layout with its StoneGate product. It is a real solution that integrates security and efficiency. Stonesoft was convincing since its layout met Cegedim’s needs and expectations. Stonesoft was chosen for its indisputable technical high qualities, as well as its cost-effectiveness.

The perfect answer to security requirements: StoneGate

Cegedim’s network is unique considering its power and bandwidth. The complete interconnection that is developed through its firewalls is optical fibre cable environment, which enables rates of several gigabits. The firewalls are also positioned like core network firewalls.

Cegedim’s network architecture is divided into several areas. StoneGate deployed in priority over the production area, because of the sensitive processed information at this level. On the first platform, the goal consisted in taking one existent in order to transfer it into StoneGate’s environment, without any loss of information. Protego integrator, and Stonesoft with its high-value technical competence, supervised the set of operations and StoneGate’s deployment, in the presence of a pre-sale engineer, thus enabling simple and transparent transition.

With the varied information given by Cegedim’s technical teams, Stonesoft has upgraded StoneGate to perfectly match the technical team’s needs and requirements. StoneGate’s strong point is great flexibility which enables to scale a modular solution, in perfect response to Cegedim’s needs and requirements. After a few months, the set of platforms was completely stable. The last deployments were performed on the hardware of all the sites of Cegedim Corporation.

Today, all the platforms have been equipped: 6 clusters in totality, with 4 among them present on central sites, one in England and the most recent one on the external site in Toulouse, France. StoneGate provides a solution of upgraded functionalities that enable secure Internet connections, security administration policies, and IPS centralised management.

« The results were significant from the start and met our needs, on top of that, adding centralised administration management and reduced costs. In the future, we do not exclude upgrading our infrastructure and calling on Stonesoft once more to help us improve our performance and services », says Frédéric Callard, Cegedim’s Networks and Security manager.

Stonesoft currently collaborates with Cegedim, in particular in several subsidiaries that require enforcing the security of their network. The different selection steps and test phases have wholly validated StoneGate’s high-quality performance, flexibility and reliability. The tests have also proved that Stonesoft was unique for security. Cegedim’s subsidiaries will address Stonesoft in priority for security projects.

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