Dial-a-Cab, a supplier of licensed taxis in central London, has chosen a network security platform, to help protect its new taxi booking and payment system. That includes a smartphone application that enables customers to book journeys and make secure payments from any location.
When Dial-a-Cab decided on an IT upgrade of its dispatching system from legacy radio sites and leased lines to 3G, it needed to install multiple resilient fibre connections to its main office to ensure consistent availability of both its LAN and secure Access Point Name (APN) onto the network. The company also had to upgrade its security system as its previous firewalls were proving difficult to manage and expensive.
Jon Winterburn, Senior Network Architect at Dial-a-Cab, said: “Confidentiality, integrity and availability are of prime importance, and we’re happy we chose Fortinet to uphold those requirements.
“We needed to ensure both our LAN and APN were communicating without compromising our internal systems and data. Our legacy VPN could not be controlled through Active Directory and was not two-factor, we had only basic SNMP logging and no IPS or IDS. Our VPN was not secure enough and diagnosis was difficult.”
Dial-a-Cab thus required an all-in-one enterprise firewall that was fault-tolerant; capable of providing reliable firewall, anti-virus, web filtering and VPN and IPS. It also had to fully integrate with Active Directory, be fast and able to cope with high loads. The product should be capable of logging to a separate unit and able to deliver human-readable log analysis and report generation.
“Our IT partner GISS UK recommended the FortiGate as a solution that could provide us with comprehensive, multi-threat protection, Active Directory integrated Web filtering, and SSL VPN, together with FortiAnalyzer for detailed log analysis. We found the technology reliable and easy to use and configure, while log analysis is fantastic, making diagnosis much easier. Fortinet provides us with the peace of mind that our services are always available and secured.”
Numerous FortiGate-200B platforms were fitted at various points in the Dial-a-Cab network in paired high-availability clusters. Fortinet’s appliances protect the online booking application, web servers and partnering services such as FTP, as well as policing threats from staff web browsing. The FortiAnalyzer-100C performs network analysis and reports on network anomalies generated by the traffic associated with 2,500 taxi-based mobile terminals and around 4 millions taxi journeys a year.
“Thanks to the broad security and flexibility of our FortiGate platform, we were able to address the complexity of Dial-a-Cab’s challenges, offering the only solution Dial-a-Cab could find which ticked every box, integrated with a clear and concise user interface and real-time logging.” said Mark Hyland, Fortinet’s Regional Director for UK and Ireland.
