Mission Critical: Heavy-Duty Net Security For SlimFast

So SlimFast, based here, turned to Mission Critical Systems, a security solution provider in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for a system using a combination of products from Check Point Software Technologies.

"All of their Internet connectivity was outsourced, and they brought it all in-house. Security was foremost," said Frank Darden, CTO of Mission Critical. "We're always concerned with security first and functionality second, but we try to find a good balance between [the two] that works well for the business."

Randy Masso, corporate network manager at SlimFast, said Internet protection was paramount as the company built its network infrastructure and brought connectivity in-house for its eight U.S. locations, including the headquarters, distribution sites and manufacturing facilities.

SlimFast, which employs about 1,000 people and generates more than $800 million in annual sales, also wanted to provide employees working remotely with secure access to corporate resources and a secure means of communicating with business partners, Masso said.

The centerpiece of Mission Critical's solution, for which the integrator provides 24x7 support, is Check Point's VPN-1 Pro, which integrates the vendor's FireWall-1 and VPN-1 for site-to-site and client-to-site VPN connectivity. Another key piece is Check Point's VPN-1 SecuRemote, which is used for the client-side VPN for SlimFast's sales force, which previously had to dial into a modem pool to access resources from home, Masso said.

"Sales reps can have realtime information whenever they want it, wherever they need it now," he said, adding that the VPN reduced SlimFast's communications costs. And although it's tough to come up with a dollar figure for exactly how much money the company has saved, the Check Point solution, which was deployed about a year ago, has "paid for itself time and time again," Masso said. "It's just a capability we never had before."

Another important part of the solution is Check Point's User Authority, which performs single sign-on at the gateway level, Darden said.

"One of the big things they wanted from us was not only the ability to protect their network from the outside but also some accountability for what their users were doing on the Internet," Darden said. "They wanted the ability to control their Internet usage from a user-log perspective rather than by IP address or some other method. %85 In SlimFast's case, the bottom line is, when you open up a browser on the Internet, the firewall knows who you are and where you are."

That granular level of information was critical to SlimFast, Masso said. But getting User Authority, which was a new product at the time, to work the way the company wanted upon initial installation was difficult and took a lot of time, he said.

"We had some stumbling blocks [with User Authority], but Check Point stepped up to the plate with developers to help us, and we got everything working great," Darden said.

Yet another component of the solution is Check Point's ClusterXL, which allows SlimFast to "take multiple firewalls and sandwich them together to look like one and provide seamless, transparent failover,not just on [SlimFast's] firewall but on its VPNs as well," Darden said.

One compelling aspect of SlimFast's overall solution is that the company is securely using applications that would typically be considered somewhat insecure on a public network,Microsoft Outlook, for instance, Darden said. "We've enabled their applications to be secure," he added.