Secure In VPN Choice

With a growing number of Network Solutions employees equipping their homes with broadband, the company needed a way to give them quick, easy and secure access to the corporate network.

"People at home have cable modems and the only way to connect them was a modem bank, and that's slow," says Rick Forno, security officer at Network Solutions, based here. "We had to come up with a solution for technical people, or those in day-to-day system operations, to work more efficiently from home for a day."

Network Solutions' Rick Forno (l.) and Spectrum's Bob Ketrick worked together on VPN project.

Network Solutions, which registers and manages domain names, opted to go with a VPN from Spectrum Systems, a solution provider based in Fairfax, Va. Spectrum integrated and installed a corporate VPN with security appliances from NetScreen Technologies, Santa Clara, Calif.

After extensive testing by Network Solutions, Spectrum and NetScreen's solution won out over several others being considered, including a product from Microsoft that provides a VPN for Windows.

"What we were most interested in was ease of administration and ease of use because we wanted to give this device to a senior executive, systems administrator or developer with a one-page instruction pamphlet," Forno says.

Spectrum's solution also fit into Network Solutions' tight time frame, he adds. "We needed to get a solution in place by a certain date just because the number of employees getting this broadband access at home was growing by leaps and bounds," Forno says.

The NetScreen appliance combines the VPN solution with a firewall.

Spectrum's solution uses 100 assorted NetScreen appliances, including the NetScreen-100 and NetScreen-10 models, which operate at 100 Mbps and 10 Mbps, respectively. Another device, the NetScreen-5, sits between the user's home PC and the Web by plugging into the user's cable or DSL line. Forno describes the device as no bigger than a pack of index cards. If an employee accesses the company's intranet from home, the device opens up an encrypted tunnel to the corporate network.

The NetScreen appliance combines the VPN solution with a firewall, making it a more attractive and secure access tool, says Bob Ketrick, information assurance director at Spectrum and manager of the project.

"It's a whole new level of security because it's all done in silicon, while if we put in a Check Point firewall with an NT box, you have all the vulnerabilities of NT and Check Point," he says. "People can get through that. If you implement NetScreen, you've made it more complicated for them to get through."

NetScreen offers an easy and cost-effective VPN solution, Ketrick says. The alternative requires buying a VPN server, a firewall server, operating systems for both, firewall and VPN software and configuration, he says.

"When you can compare that to putting an appliance in the rack, turning it on and configuring it, you're better off going with NetScreen," he says.

Forno says he was pleased with the on-site engineering support Spectrum provided while Network Solutions tested the devices.

"One of their sales engineers made house calls to make sure the devices were up and running," he says. "Once we were talking to them at 4 p.m. on a stormy Saturday afternoon."