Fortinet announced that Giant Tiger, a leading Canadian family discount retailer, has deployed FortiGate appliances, FortiAP wireless appliances as well as Fortinet's analysis appliance, FortiAnalyzer. The FortiGate appliances are being used for core and distributed network security protection by helping to provide firewall, IPSec VPN, SSL VPN, antivirus, intrusion prevention, application control and web content filtering protection. FortiAnalyzer is also being used to analyze network usage at the headquarters and at the more than 200 retail stores.

Giant Tiger is a family discount retailer offering recognizable basic products at low everyday prices and operates under the brand names: Giant Tiger, GTXpress, Scott's Discount and Chez Tante Marie. With more than 7,000 employees working at more than 200 retail locations, it was important for the retailer to provide secure virtual private network (VPN) connections between the stores and headquarters as well as to protect the infrastructure from harmful network attacks.

Previously using a Juniper network security solution, Giant Tiger was having difficulty managing disparate security appliances. Working closely with Fortinet partner, INSA, a Canadian-based service and consulting firm specializing in IT Network Security, Giant Tiger looked at Fortinet, Juniper, Websense and SonicWall when it came time to refresh its network infrastructure. Fortinet was selected for many reasons including the no per user licensing needed. Additionally, the FortiGate appliances' virtual domain (VDOM) ability reduced the amount of appliances needed at each location which would ultimately reduce capital costs.

"The simplicity of the configuration and management of the Fortinet appliances was far better than the competitors," said Eric Boudreau, senior network operations manager & information security strategist at Giant Tiger. "The FortiGate platform offered the virtualization option via VDOMs which is enabling us to replace a mix of transparent and routed firewalls with a single FortiGate appliance at every one of our store locations. With Fortinet, we're saving time, money and valuable space within each store location."

A FortiGate appliance is located at Giant Tiger's central hub and is being used to inspect traffic traversing the network, including the traffic coming in and out of the retail locations. In addition, the company has given SSL VPN access to more than 200 Giant Tiger employees who need to connect remotely to the corporate network.

Within the stores, FortiGate appliances are being used as a site-to-site IPSec termination point and with Fortinet's VDOM capability, the company has the ability to have a second virtual firewall deployed in transparent mode at the stores. Additionally, all Giant Tiger stores have a FortiAP thin access point deployed which replaced Motorola APs. Because the FortiGate appliance acts as a wireless controller, Giant Tiger was able to eliminate the need for a separate wireless controller device at each store, thereby further saving time, money and space.

Giant Tiger can also allow specific parts of Web 2.0 applications and not others. For example, they can allow for instant messaging, but not for file transfer within IM. This helps the company maintain productivity with its employees and third party vendors but reduces the risk of the network being infiltrated by botnets and other types of malicious attacks.

To easily manage and analyze data traversing the corporate network and the network of the 205 retail stores, Giant Tiger has deployed a FortiGate FortiAnalyzer solution. The solution allows the IT staff to easily run reports on network usage while also being able to remotely make network changes.

"One of the benefits of the Fortinet solution is the detecting of malicious traffic and blocking it so we prevent infection at the endpoints. As a distributed enterprise, this is critical for us," said Mike Lewis, Executive Vice President & CIO for Giant Tiger. "Since deploying the Fortinet enterprise network security solution, our systems are now streamlined because we have only one central location where we set our policies, one place to look at if we want to understand why traffic isn't passing and we now have just one place to look when we need to troubleshoot."

"Retailers are under constant scrutiny to make sure that their networks are secure -- both at the core and at the endpoint," said Graham Bushkes, Vice President for Fortinet Canada. "The FortiGate enterprise network security solutions meets the needs of retailers by providing security to help protect against network and content level threats, superior ease-of-management and multi-threat protection."