Fortinet has announced that InterBolsa has deployed FortiGate multi-threat security appliances for high-performance, low-latency firewall.

One of the largest investment banking groups in Latin America, InterBolsa is involved on a daily basis in high-level business dealings and must adhere to the highest security standards related to the management, recording and control of content and conversations between stock exchange operators and customers. With its Brazil headquarters in São Paulo and branches in Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba, the company needed a broad, high-performance security solution that offered stability and high availability and was easy to operate.

"We evaluated several options and searched for a solution that would be very reliable and simple to manage," said Sergio Mirsky, IT director of InterBolsa. "We chose Fortinet for some basic reasons: easy to use, expanded functionality and granular control. InterBolsa is the largest brokerage firm in Latin America and carries hundreds of transactions daily, the reason we need to execute activities with the greatest safety and agility. For a broker, one minute means a lot of money and that is where the firewall performance becomes exceptionally important in terms of security and transaction speed."

InterBolsa installed three FortiGate-310B multi-threat security appliances in high availability mode at its Brazil headquarters in São Paulo. The company also deployed a FortiGate-111C in Rio de Janeiro and a FortiGate-111C in Curitiba. Mirksy said that one of the strengths in choosing a Fortinet solution was the total cost of ownership, because a single appliance offers firewall integration, intrusion prevention (IPS), antivirus, Web content filtering, application control, WAN acceleration and inspection of SSL.

"We now have all these features on a single platform for one price, as well as a single management interface," Mirsky said. "This offers us a level of complete content protection that we just didn't feel confident we'd receive from other vendors."

In addition to using the FortiGate for firewall and other core security features, InterBolsa uses the appliances for load balancing, which helps to ensure continuity of services in a transparent and automated way. Additionally, InterBolsa has an MPLS network connecting its subsidiaries, and does redundancy of this connection through VPNs controlled automatically by the FortiGate. InterBolsa acquired all equipment with integrated WAN optimization, which also reduces costs.

The deployment was carried out by Fortinet partner StorageWay Technology.

"We wanted to bring the best unified security solution to InterBolsa, which is why we presented Fortinet. The technology is easy to administer, high performing, reliable and meets the safety standards required in this sector," said Claudio Mencarini, commercial director of Storageway Technology.

Complementing the Fortinet solution is the FortiAnalyzer appliance for logging and reporting and the FortiManager appliance for centralized management of all Fortinet equipment deployed throughout Brazil.

"Financial services companies have especially intricate security needs and it's critical that they can meet these needs while also enhancing the reliability of their networks," said Pedro Paixao, Vice President of Latin America sales for Fortinet. "Fortinet's multi-threat security solutions, which include a potent low-latency firewall, is well-suited for environments such as InterBolsa as they help to ensure network uptime and reduction of threats."