Stonesoft Solutions help La Maison de la Literie
get a good night’s sleep
Paris,
April 27th 2009 - The “Maison de la Literie” chain, whose corporate headquarters are
located in Suresnes, in the Paris region, was founded in the 1980’s. This innovative chain of
retail bedding stores, whose rights are held by MDL International, was the first chain in France to
specialize in bedding. With 250 retail outlets in France, the chain has been gradually expanding
internationally since 2007, particularly in Morocco and Spain, and even in the United States (where
it has one store in Florida). Over 90 stores, including about 60 branch stores report directly to
MDL’s head office and are linked to its information system.
The challenge
The need for a high-availability network security solution to ensure business continuity and
avoid outages or loss of productivity on the chain’s network stemmed primarily from the plan to
host the chain’s e-commerce site at the company’s corporate headquarters. About a year ago, Chief
Information Officer Jérôme Boyer, who had already used Stonesoft technology in the past, quite
naturally thought of the Finnish software house for this new project as well. It was essential for
Boyer to have a high-quality tool, particularly in terms of its administrative capabilities and
real-time monitoring of logs.
Deployment
After studying the
solutions proposed by Stonesoft’s competitors through his IBM partner NLE, Boyer took the time to
update his knowledge of Stonesoft products. The project then got underway in December 2007. In
September 2008, MDL International’s corporate headquarters deployed two Stonegate FW (firewall)
appliances in an active-active cluster and a VPN solution for the High Availability (HA) connection
to its head office annex located in Puteaux.
Boyer’s knowledge of the products made it possible to considerably shorten the deliberation
time for this project.
Benefits and perspectives
According to Boyer, the most decisive criteria in his decision to work with Stonesoft again were
the performance level of the products and their management mode, which provides above-average
performance compared with other solutions. Cost and the excellent relationship established by the
software house were also major factors in this decision: Stonesoft gave a clear, direct, easily
understandable and highly practical demonstration of the solution (by simulating hard-to-detect
outages). Following this demonstration, Boyer was able to see that this solution worked extremely
well in his environment and provided the protection he needed for the most critical network
protocols.Boyer also added that it was the “security” aspect of the Stonesoft firewall that
impressed him the most, particularly the application-level security analysis function over certain
protocols, which was an important security function included in the project specifications. In
terms of results, he was also pleased to regain full control over the security of interconnection
points, to be able to centrally manage all security policies and have a tool that can correctly “
debug” Web applications. The Maison de la Literie was also impressed by the many references cited
during the sales presentation made by the Stonesoft team.
Conclusion
Boyer is very satisfied with this new project with Stonesoft, which enabled him to deploy the chain’s e-commerce site with full protection for the host server and ensure its ongoing availability. In this regard, he commented “For me, Stonegate is the Rolls-Royce of high-availability. When searching the market, I didn’t find any other solution that fulfilled as many high-availability criteria as Stonesoft’s. Their products take an extremely rigorous approach to security. Among other things, I particularly appreciated the multi-link VPN technology with seamless session fail-over.” Throughout the project, he also appreciated the availability and competence of all the Stonesoft teams.
About Stonesoft
Stonesoft Corporation (NASDAQ OMX: SFT1V) is an innovative provider of integrated network security solutions to secure the information flow of distributed organizations. Stonesoft customers include enterprises with growing business needs requiring advanced network security and always-on business connectivity.StoneGate™ Secure Connectivity Solution unifies firewall, VPN, IPS and SSL VPN blending network security, end-to-end availability and award-winning load balancing into a centrally managed system. The key benefits of StoneGate Secure Connectivity Solution include low TCO, excellent price-performance ratio and high ROI. The StoneGate Virtual Security Solutions protect the network and ensure business continuity in both virtual and physical network environments.
StoneGate Management Center provides unified management for StoneGate Firewall with VPN, IPS and SSL VPN. StoneGate Firewall and IPS work together to provide intelligent defense throughout the enterprise network while StoneGate SSL VPN provides enhanced security for mobile and remote use.
Founded in 1990, Stonesoft Corporation is a global company with corporate headquarters in Helsinki, Finland and Americas headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information, visit www.stonesoft.com and http://stoneblog.stonesoft.com.
