NETWORKS

St. George Bank, Australia’s fifth largest bank and one of the country’s top 15 publicly listed companies, has deployed a Juniper Networks integrated firewall and virtual private network (VPN) security solution to secure its corporate network and critical resources. "As a financial services firm, robust security for confidential customer data and strong return on investment are critical factors in selecting products for our IT infrastructure," said Michael McCutcheon, senior manager, Infrastructure Architecture, Architecture & Planning, for St. George Bank. "The Juniper solution made sense because of its purpose-built, hardware-based approach that provides significant operational advantages, robust performance and advanced security features integrated into a single platform." St. George Bank replaced 18 software-based firewalls with four Juniper Networks NetScreen-5200 systems, and utilises the Virtual Systems feature to logically partition and secure multiple network domains with distinct administrators, address books, user lists, custom services, VPNs, and policies. The high-performance NetScreen-5200 system, which provides 4 Gbps firewall and 2 Gbps 3 DES IPSec VPN throughput, delivers advanced security functionality, including stateful firewall, VPN, DoS and DDoS protection, and traffic management functionality, in a low-profile modular chassis for large enterprise, carrier, and data centre networks. The devices include a distributed system architecture and employ a switch fabric for data exchange with a separate multi-bus channel for control information to provide scalable performance for the most demanding environments, and offer excellent scalability and flexibility. "By consolidating our security infrastructure with Juniper Networks NetScreen products, we enjoyed immediate savings in headcount, maintenance costs, and equipment footprint," said McCutcheon. "In addition, the reduced complexity in reducing 18 machines to four systems makes for much easier and flexible ongoing administration and scalability." "We’re very excited that St. George Bank selected Juniper Networks," said Shaun Page, director, Australia/New Zealand, Juniper Networks. "Its choice underlines a continuing trend: customers replacing legacy firewall solutions with Juniper Networks security solutions based on the unparalleled performance and ongoing requirements for scalability and return on investment."