Check Point Solutions help Regione Marche implement an agile, unified, and streamlined approach to security
Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. , a leading provider of cyber security solutions globally, has been chosen by Regione Marche, the local government body governing the Italian region of Marche, with the aim of driving the security consolidating multiple point solutions and clusters into a powerful, scalable security infrastructure, improving management consistency across environments and locations and ensuring security continuity for the business and services.
Located in central Italy, the region of Marche, include five provinces and 239 municipalities, is governed by a local organization, called Regione Marche, counting 3000 employees and managing a wide range of administrative, financial, healthcare, and political services. Especially, as Regione Marche manages the sensitive data both healthcare and financial of all inhabitants, the security was always very important for this public administration. But, due to the persistent movement of cyber-attacks and threats, such as attacks range from phishing and website defacement to malware and advanced persistent threats aimed at data exfiltration, for Regione Marche it became very difficult to ensure security consistently across the region.
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The main challenge for Regione Marche was the firewall management, because the IT infrastructure counted five different firewalls with five different management systems. “It was a battle to manage our security infrastructure consistently,” said Domenico Cacciari, Network Administrator for Regione Marche. “We didn’t have a unified view of our infrastructure, and if something went wrong, troubleshooting was crazy. We began looking for a centralized security solution that could be managed from a single pane of glass.”
After considering several options, Regione Marche found in Check Point solutions – Check Point Quantum Next Generation Security Gateways™, Check Point Virtual Systems and R80.40 Security Management – the best technology to meet its needs and the easiest system to configurate. The choice revealed prodigious when COVID hit. The situation immediately got worse, because within a day, most employees began working from home, which increased the need for strong security, VPN access, and high bandwidth.
The Check Point Quantum Next Generation Firewall Security Gateways™, combining SandBlast threat prevention, hyper-scale networking, a unified management platform, remote access VPN and IOT security implemented were three, one in each data center, and delivered secure, multi-gigabit threat prevention and zero-day protection. The Check Point Virtual Systems enabled then Regione Marche to consolidate its infrastructure by creating multiple virtualized security gateways on each Quantum Security Gateway. Specifically, the Virtual System Extension (VSX) feature provided comprehensive protection for VLANs across the Regione Marche’s locations, securely connecting them to shared resources and each other. It also allowed the IT team to easily manage custom security policies based on each organization’s requirements. Check Point’s Virtual System Load Sharing (VSLS) capability reliably enhanced scalability by distributing traffic loads across the cluster machines. Finally, the R80.40 Security Management. Thanks to this technology, Regione Marche unified security policy control and the visibility of threats across the entire infrastructure. The team now has a single pane of glass visibility into physical and virtual elements across three data centers. They can tailor policies for each constituent’s virtual system and change policy on the fly if needed.
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“The process went much faster and easier than we had expected,” said Cacciari. “The Check Point Quantum Security Gateways maintained firewall security and provided the VPN connection for the migration. Everything went perfectly.”
The powerful, scalable security infrastructure and the unified approach together with high level technology in terms of threat prevention and protection were the instant benefits for Regione Marche. If in the past, the team could spend two or three days simply troubleshooting an issue, now with Check Point Software, the IT team can respond in less than an hour. Also, thanks to the unified visibility, Cacciari can check, manage, and know exactly what’s happening with each virtual environment. “I’ve already recommended Check Point to colleagues in other administrations,” said Cacciari. “We experience the quality of Check Point every day. There’s only one thing to say—it’s a great solution.”
“Regione Marche represented a very good milestone for the Italian team” underlined Marco Fanuli, Security Engineer Team Leader Italy of Check Point Software Technologies. “The challenge was huge, because the IT infrastructure of Regione Marche was fragmented with sensitive data to protect. Moreover, the explosion of the COVID could make it all worse. But, Check Point technology made the difference offering a system able to unifying the existing IT infrastructures and solve all the cybersecurity problems of the organization, even in the case of a new unpredictable phenomenon, like the pandemics”.
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