The South African Hellenic Educational and Technical Institute (Saheti) is benefitting from a managed firewall service provided by LanDynamix.
The school, one of South Africa’s top independent schools, had implemented Fortinet’s Fortigate, a next-generation firewall appliance designed to secure corporate IT environments using leading-edge technology and services.
However, it was receiving inadequate support from its then-current service provider, and turned to LanDynamix for help.
“Cyber-threats are a major headache for any corporate IT environment and, of course, the stakes are raised for us because IT is essential to the teaching and learning process,” says Justin Harper, ICT manager at Saheti. “However, the extent of the threat means that the counter to it is necessarily highly complex, and requires specialist knowledge.
“Bringing LanDynamix on board gives us peace of mind as they manage the firewall as a service on our behalf. This means that our small in-house IT team is not distracted from its core focus of providing the digital platform for Saheti’s teachers and pupils.”
Because Saheti had already purchased the Fortigate kit, it retains ownership of it and remains responsible for the annual licence fees. LanDynamix then manages the appliance and all related services, including proactively monitoring the device, installing any patches and ensuring that new equipment or applications are protected.
Other benefits of the managed service approach include the fact that LanDynamix back up the configuration data on the firewall twice daily. Because the configuration settings are extremely complex, this simple housekeeping means that in the event of an outage, the firewall can be restored quickly.
LanDynamix also uses Fortinet Analytics to provide in-depth reporting so that the school can easily obtain a security and bandwidth overview of the network . This is of general management use, and is particularly useful in enabling administrators to identify abuse of the school IT system by pupils.
“The combination of client ownership of the hardware and the provision of managed services by a third-party provider like LanDynamix shows the inherent flexibility of the managed services model–and the emphasis we place on providing what our clients want,” says Dane Walker, cloud infrastructure manager at LanDynamix.
“For Saheti, the key is to know that there is proactive management in place to ensure that their environment is secure against a rapidly evolving set of threats, and that the firewall is properly configured to ensure the right balance between openness and security.”