Distributed Enterprise Chooses WatchGuard for Centralized Management and Overall Value
Challenge
Operating 41 locations throughout the United States, DP Fox Ventures, LLC is a diversified management company with interests in transportation, real estate, fashion, sports and entertainment. Jestin Simon, IT manager at DP Fox, knows well the challenges of managing IT for multiple sites.
“Our offices are quite spread out geographically, with clusters of businesses throughout Michigan and Illinois, as well as operations in New York and in the Bahamas. Having the ability to control staff access to the Internet is critical to ensure that employees have enough access for business purposes, but not so much that they’re downloading harmful viruses and getting into applications that aren’t work-related. We need robust protection from threats for all of our PCs and infrastructure, which can be very challenging when you don’t always have a dedicated, on-site IT department.”
The company’s previous SonicWall appliances did not offer the ease of management that is so essential to an expanding enterprise like DP Fox, so the company decided to evaluate alternative solutions, ultimately choosing the WatchGuard platform.
Solution
WatchGuard’s manageability and overall value were the deciding factors to standardize over the SonicWall appliances, with DP Fox deploying rack-mount and tabletop Firebox models – equipped with WatchGuard’s Total Security Suite of subscription services – throughout their offices.
For consistent application of security policies, distributed organizations like DP Fox Ventures need to standardize on a configuration template that can be deployed centrally. Given the typical scarcity of dedicated IT resources throughout every location within a distributed enterprise, deployments must occur in a quick and cost-effective manner.
WatchGuard System Manager and WatchGuard Management Server, which come standard with all Firebox models, do just that – enabling centralized management of acceptable use policies to ensure consistent rules and timely software upgrades.
Results
“Onboarding new locations is easy with WatchGuard, and with applying our preset WatchGuard template,” reflected Jestin. “We have a core set of applications that is very easy to roll out with WatchGuard’s centralized management.
“When I first started with DP Fox Ventures, we were using ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network.) Now, using WatchGuard branch office VPN really makes things a lot simpler for us, and really opened up the possibilities for faster Internet access for employees at each site. From when we started doing it to now, we’ve seen major improvements in productivity due to faster Internet access.”
WatchGuard System Manager and Management Server have also proven critical in the ongoing management of remote locations. “Centralized management really makes it a lot easier to implement changes across the board, and to make sure that when we do deploy a new site, everything is already in place and ready to go from day one – without much tweaking needed at all. We use WatchGuard System Manager and Management Server and it’s really valuable to be able to assign delegated access to certain subsets of our sites, to certain technicians, and to also have a single pane of glass through which to admin our boxes. We didn’t always have that, but once we did with WatchGuard, it made things a lot easier to work on all of our distributed sites.
“The WatchGuard Fireboxes just keep getting better and better with each new software release. WatchGuard appliances are easy for someone without a ton of specialized training to pick up and run with, and the online forums, support, and documentation from WatchGuard are all excellent.”