Firewall migration project goes without hitch due to Practice-Labs!
Client: Financial Services Institution
Service Required: Practice-Labs
Background
Our client is a large financial institution with multiple offices located across the globe. Most IT functions are governed by the ITIL process as well as conforming to standards defined by industry accreditation programs.
As with most IT departments, there is a shortage of resources available to maintain an up to date test and development lab. Couple this with a lack of accessibility as most test labs need to be completely separated from the live environment, the transfer of information between live and test environments becomes cumbersome, time consuming and risky.
Problem
To help reduce costs and environment complexity a large firewall consolidation project was embarked upon, involving the merge of a mix of silo Checkpoint environments in to a single Checkpoint VSX platform.
As the software versions varied, it was important to upgrade each software revision to the version of Checkpoint VSX SmartCenter server so that the objects databases and policies on each silo system could be merged in to one for the migration to take place.
Red tape and a lack of hardware meant that the migration was going to be drawn out and complex and most importantly very high risk as the Checkpoint VSX environment was already in production.
Solution
Practice-Labs seemed the ideal solution for the client. Practice-Labs enabled the client to quickly start testing options to build and test the migration process at each phase, cleaning and removing duplicate objects throughout the process. Being able to resolve these issues in a safe environment was crucial to the success of the project.
The Practice-Labs solution also had an additional side benefit in that its shadowing capabilities enabled permanent employees and external resources to assist in troubleshoot issues that occurred throughout the migration process.
Benefits in brief
- Zero change control meaning faster time for project completion
- Pre-advanced warning and resolution of migration errors
- Cleaning the Checkpoint objects database before it hit a production environment
- Shadowing capabilities for internal and external resources to assist in troubleshooting problems
- Value for money
Project Success
The entire project was completed without a hitch, on time and on budget. This is largely due to the reduction in costs caused by maintaining a dedicated test lab, minimising the need for out of hours change controls and the competitive price of the Practice-Labs service.
