Case Studies
Major City GovernmentThe municipal government in a major city in the Northwest spends nearly $2 billion annually to provide public safety, education, and other vital services to its 536,000 residents. This city pioneered the use of information technology and the Internet. Through its official Website and other applications, the city shared important information with the public and its 3,000 employees. To improve efficiency and security, the city wanted to create a single secure Internet gateway to secure, streamline and simplify its network architecture.
This major city’s existing network contained a number of potential risks. Municipal agencies accessed the Internet through different service providers and Internet security gateways. Failure of any individual system could prevent municipal agencies from sharing critical information.
Structured’s SolutionUnder the leadership of Structured’s vice president of secure infrastructure, William Ketrenos, CISSP, we designed and deployed a unified Internet access gateway that would be used by all of our client’s municipal agencies and would facilitate numerous critical operations, including police, fire and other public safety tasks.
We started with an ISP review process to select two companies to provide services to the municipal government. Then we aggregated all of the city’s agencies within the new Internet gateway, and paid particular attention to ensure that the deployment of the new gateway would not cause failures in existing systems.
Several of Structured’s key strategic partners—Checkpoint, Nokia, Radware, Foundry and Cisco—provided the technology for the city’s new, unified enterprise gateway. Within the network we also integrated a suite of active and secondary systems that provided the client with secure, fault-tolerant solutions for connectivity, access and security.
ResultsThe city now operates a single, secure Internet gateway used by all of its offices and agencies. This new, consolidated network replaced the municipal government’s previous system of separate ISPs, firewalls and Internet gateways, which immediately reduced cost and complexity through consolidation and centralization.
The new network not only exceeded the technological requirements established by the client’s Bureau of Information Technology, Structured completed the project on time and under budget. We also implemented the network, and migrated vital data and users without system interruption, data corruption, or data loss.