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Securing Future Mobility for Bromford
Bromford was heavily reliant on its IT infrastructure to support its staff’s flexible working environment, including VPN, web applications, and mobile devices. Protecting sensitive data, including personal information, is a top priority for Bromford.
Learn how FourNet updated their existing single firewall setup was no longer flexible or resilient enough to accommodate their growth and modern working practices, prompting them to seek a new alternative.
The Problem
Headquartered in Wolverhampton and named after a bridge in Castle Bromwich, Bromford describe themselves as “a social enterprise with an important purpose”. Bromford offers a growing range of services to its local communities including courses to help find work; support to help get tenancies off to the best possible start; money advice; skills coaches to help access the right training or learning opportunities and information and advice about home ownership.
To deliver these services, Bromford have a large number of staff who in turn rely heavily on its IT infrastructure. Enjoying a flexible working environment, users depend on services that support their mobility, such as VPN, web applications and mobile devices, on a daily basis in order to do their jobs efficiently.
Protecting its data, which includes the personal details of those that use its services, is of course of the highest importance and, like other organisations, the company had relied on a single firewall for perimeter security and on-line access. But, due to its growth and support for modern working practices the existing arrangement no longer provided the flexibility for change or the resilience it required to support its ongoing operations, and so a new alternative was sought.
The Solution
FourNet’s winning design addressed all of the primary requirements for security, performance, resilience and future proofed flexible capacity. The solution is based on a resilient pair of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA’s) one located at Bromford’s headquarters and the other at a secondary site.
Internet connectivity has been enhanced through dual active 100Mbps services running on gigabit circuits, provided and fully managed by FourNet, and offering not only complete redundancy to circuit failure but ample room for the predicted traffic growth as bandwidth-hungry services such as video collaboration become more commonplace.
The powerful ASA5525X devices not only provide a highly effective Firewall but also easily support the 1000 concurrent Virtual Private Network connections arising from some 1300 mobile device-equipped staff using the AnyConnect client to seamlessly connect to Bromford’s application and information resources from a variety of devices.
Outcomes
Following the successful deployment of the new service FourNet’s ongoing support services stand behind Bromford’s team helping to ensure they continue to enjoy its benefits in full.