Ben Burgess

The Challenge

The primary goals of the project were to provide a secure site-to-site WAN utilising the public Internet to form an internet Wide Area Network alongside filtered staff and guest access to the Internet itself.

The Solution

The WAN comprises of dual Internet links to each location, provided by a variety of ISPs, utilising the most cost effective carrier methods for a particular site, primarily ADSL & FTTC. The choice of ISP and connection technology was used to provide resilience where possible. Fortinet’s WAN Link Load Balancing technology was used to balance traffic to and from the Internet across the pair of links.

Technical Implementation

A fully meshed IPsec VPN was created between all sites using the FortiNet FortiManager centralised management and reporting platform which enabled direct multi-site to multi-site traffic with extensive resilience in the event of one or more Internet link failures. Staff Internet access is filtered using the FortiNet NGFW+ATP licence advanced features Web Filtering and Application Control. These enable advanced gradual control of website access and application traffic, for example allowing Webex desktop sharing but blocking the transfer of files through it. With a traffic control system of this power and complexity very clear definition of requirements is needed to deliver the correct results for the customer.

An additional feature which Ben Burgess have subsequently adopted is Guest Internet access. Visitors to their sites, for example suppliers who are there for meetings, can be granted temporarily access to the Internet (but of course not the corporate networks) by signing up using a captive portal web page which is automatically generated when they connect to the ‘Guest’ ESSID. This has proved a very popular feature with Ben Burgess as it truly makes the most of their Internet services and saved them purchasing a separate solution for public/Guest access.