Total Security Suite Keeps Wrest Park Clients Compliant and Protected
Challenge
Most companies are responsible solely for their own cyber security. But as a provider of serviced offices across the south-east of England, Wrest Park Ltd has to protect the operations of over 2,000 clients. For Head of IT Bob Sampson, this presents a business-critical challenge. With clients ranging from charities and educational firms to medical and financial & accounting companies, with anything from one to 100-plus users – Wrest Park’s reputation rests on its ability to adapt to all their different needs and demands, while still providing gold-standard security.
“Our corporate goal is to provide a premium business environment and to enable our ten¬ants to operate in a flexible, secure environment,” Bob said. “But many of our clients are not technical, nor have easy access to data security information. So, we aim to provide security and compliance in as many ways as possible. Often it is a case of trying to do the thinking for them and giving them answers maybe before they’ve even realise they’ve got a problem.
“As a serviced office provider, we need to accommodate any application or technology that a client wishes to use within our network infrastructure. It’s a very broad base of require¬ments. Aside from day-to-day applications such as Office, we have many bespoke, cloud or distributed apps – and for all these, we have to provide a solution that is both flexible whilst maintaining security.”
Solution
To achieve this, Wrest Park has deployed a fleet of over 20 WatchGuard firewall systems across its 15 sites, along with WatchGuard’s Total Security Suite of software, including anti-virus, spam and APT (advanced persistent threat) blocking, and intrusion and data loss prevention solutions.
This security blanket has been crucial to Wrest Park’s business success. “We see WatchGuard as both helping to protect our clients – and therefore their relationship with us – as well as a value-add to help them to address their vulnerabilities,” Bob said. “Applications such as WebBlocker allow clients like our children’s charity to effectively block access to inappropriate websites, whilst other clients who spend huge portions of their day online get protection from functions like the reputation-enabled defence and Gateway AntiVirus.”
So why choose WatchGuard over other major firewall solutions? Bob explained: “I’ve personally used Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, Palo Alto, SonicWall and Check Point amongst others, but I’ve always returned to using WatchGuard wherever possible. The combination of pricing, support, functionality and ease of deployment makes it an excellent fit into so many businesses.”
Results
“One of the things I like best about WatchGuard is the fact you can install it out-of-the-box with basic functionality in a few minutes. I have always found the WatchGuard configuration the easiest to both manage and set up, but the package as a whole is excellent –along with ease of use and the support from WatchGuard and its resellers, the functions in the WatchGuard Total Security Suite offer a really excellent range of tools.”
For the future, Wrest Park is considering WatchGuard’s RapidDeploy and Wi-Fi offerings. As Bob said: “The interaction with the firewalls along with the pricing makes the WatchGuard secure Wi-Fi option a serious contender when we look to upgrade our infrastructure to the latest Wi-Fi standards in the next year.” More significantly, based on the success of its security strategy, Wrest Park aims to offer clients WatchGuard’s enhanced Total Security Suite to install onsite and protect their networks. “By having such a powerful application suite available across so many companies, we can offer enterprise-level security to clients who would never even consider such protection,” Bob said. “This option has been received extremely positively in discussions with our clients, as so many of them are aware of the cyber threats out there, but till now have never had access to the tools we are looking to offer. I think this helps set us apart from most other serviced office centres and we’re really proud to be able to partner with WatchGuard to provide it.”