Reports 72 Percent Reduction in Operating Costs Post-Implementation
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Oct. 15, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in broad, integrated and automated
cybersecurity solutions, today announced that the Abu Dhabi City Municipality (ADM) has deployed Fortinet’s solutions as a
foundation to secure its critical networks and data across its headquarters and 45 branch locations in the city. The ADM has
selected the Fortinet Security Fabric to gain end-to-end visibility, automation and control into its network,
cloud applications and IoT devices and to help protect its critical network from known and unknown attacks.
The Abu Dhabi City Municipality is an efficient municipal system ensuring sustainable development and enhancing
the quality of life criteria for the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Its main mission is to achieve and deliver best-in-class efficient
and customer centric municipal services by engaging with the community and partners.
With ADM’s critical network and data assets spread across its headquarters and 45 branches in the city of Abu
Dhabi, most of its existing security solutions were in silos. This meant limited visibility and control over the network and
devices. With an increase in IoT vulnerabilities, ransomware, and enterprise application threats, it became imperative for ADM to
have a single security platform to secure its network and data, which includes sensitive information on Lands & Proprieties
Ownerships, City & Buildings Infrastructure, but also contains PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and intellectual property
data.
“We wanted to have a complete security strategy approach in one platform, ensuring a zero-trust model and
positive security implementation. It was important for the solution to provide threat detection, prevention, and response
capabilities. It had to allow for internal segmentation, complete end-to-end visibility and superior protection from advanced
threats,” said Ali Mohamed Aljeadi, Head of IT Infrastructure and Security (CISO), at Abu Dhabi City Municipality.
After evaluating several solutions from vendors such as Cisco and Palo Alto Networks, ADM selected Fortinet’s
FortiGate range of next-generation firewalls as it met its stringent selection criteria while
providing a single-pane-of-glass management and reporting system, flexible features and integration capabilities with third party
vendors via the Fortinet Security Fabric’s open architecture, high performance and unmatched third party validation. The fact that Fortinet offered local technical assistance center (TAC)
support had also a significant impact on ADM’s decision.
“Fortinet has provided us with a suite of solutions and a single-pane-of-glass approach for monitoring,
managing, and reporting. The solution is easy to manage, allowing the security administration staff to focus on critical tasks,
therefore reducing time to identify and mitigate threats. We also need fewer resources to manage the appliances,” added
Aljeadi.
A combination of Fortinet’s solutions have been deployed including FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls (three high-end FortiGate 3200D, 24 FortiGate 300D, 45
FortiGate 81E, four FortiGate 30E), FortiSandbox 3000E, and FortiAnalyzer 1000E, across ADM’s headquarters and 45 branches within Abu Dhabi City to secure
close to nine thousand users.
FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls provide ADM with Intrusion Prevention Systems, VPNs, URL Filtering, Web
Antivirus, Anti-Spam, Anti-X, Antivirus and Sandboxing. ADM has also subscribed to Fortinet’s services, while utilizing the
FortiAnalyzer to generate periodic reports for both C-level executives and the security team. The implementation took place in two
phases with the datacentre and ATP being completed in Q1 of 2018, while the SD-WAN implementation for the headquarters and major
branches was completed in Q2 of 2018.
“We are delighted to see an almost immediate return on investment so early after implementation. Not only have
we received high-end protection, but have also reduced our annual OPEX by more than 72 percent, while increasing our latency and
network capacity fourfold. We have received significant business benefits in which our annual CAPEX of ISP for MPLS has reduced
from 3.5 million dirhams to less than one million dirhams,” said Aljeadi.
“As we witness the convergence of IT and OT, securing tangible and intangible assets has become an important
aspect of physical security. The ADM is a great example of how government establishments approach cybersecurity and trust the
Fortinet Security Fabric to secure their mission-critical networks and data. We are proud to have the Abu Dhabi City Municipality
as a prestigious addition to our customers in the public sector,” said Alain Penel, Regional Vice President - Middle East,
Fortinet. “ADM will benefit from the Fortinet Security Fabric approach with actionable intelligence, integrated network intrusion
prevention, application awareness and added firewall intelligence.”
The FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls have helped ADM resolve multiple challenges such as user identification,
while improving SSL performance by enabling visibility and control of network activity on a per-user basis. It has resolved a
content identification challenge to prevent data leakage and stop threats with detailed, real-time traffic inspection through
threat prevention, URL filtering, and file and data filtering.
Finally, the intuitive FortiPortal web interface has reduced the learning curve for the security administration
team and allowed them to efficiently manage the FortiGate appliances through a single-pane-of-glass approach. In addition, Fortinet
carried out intensive training sessions for the team, while ADM has access to Fortinet’s FortiCare services.
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Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) secures the largest enterprise, service provider, and government organizations around the world. Fortinet
empowers its customers with intelligent, seamless protection across the expanding attack surface and the power to take on
ever-increasing performance requirements of the borderless network - today and into the future. Only the Fortinet Security Fabric
architecture can deliver security without compromise to address the most critical security challenges, whether in networked,
application, cloud or mobile environments. Fortinet ranks #1 in the most security appliances shipped worldwide and more than
360,000 customers trust Fortinet to protect their businesses. Learn more at http://www.fortinet.com, the Fortinet Blog, or FortiGuard Labs.
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