OVERVIEW Founded in 1996, Cobweb Solutions offers a range of Cloud solutions including: Hosted Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Enterprise Mobility Suite, Azure, Power BI, Dynamics CRM, Hosted Desktop, Email Archiving, Email Encryption and Cloud Backup. Based in Fareham, Hampshire and Canary Wharf, London Cobweb provides Cloud solutions to over 6,000 SMBs and over 320 partners through Vuzion the new cloud aggregator business for resellers. An early adopter of Microsoft Exchange, Cobweb is a long-established provider of cloud communications and a gold-status member of the Microsoft Partner Network. CHALLENGE Cobweb provides hosted services for over 150,000 mailboxes, managing firewalls for hundreds of locations with complex, overlapping IP schemas. The impact of overlapping schemas to Cobweb and its customers created an inability to deliver the service to customers. “It’s a monumental task. Having easy-to-access insight into the whole system is a necessity. The company’s reputation hinges on its services being secure and constantly up and running.” — Julian Dyer, Chief Technical Officer, Cobweb Furthermore, Cobweb has to ensure that the environment is up-todate in order to manage a continually evolving threat landscape. Visits to perform data center upgrades in Segensworth, Fareham, and one in Telehouse, London were proving to be time intensive, and the company needed a system it could rely on to upgrade automatically. SOLUTION According to Dyer, the decision to migrate to Forcepoint Stonesoft Next Generation Firewall (NGFW)—part of the Forcepoint Security product offering—was not taken lightly. Cobweb wanted to move away from the expensive licensing model it had previously, and pay only for the features it needed. The deployment option of Stonesoft Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS) for virtual versions of Stonesoft NGFW is the affordable licensing model Cobweb was looking for. In addition, centralized security management, combined with the flexibility to add security features such as a delegated local administrator and capacity, helped drive the decision to implement Stonesoft NGFW. “We were able to replace overlapping encryption domains with site-to-site VPNs that take minutes to configure. We simply use the domain feature to logically separate the organization, delegating local administrative control if we choose.” — Dyer RESULTS Implementing Stonesoft NGFW has enabled Cobweb to increase bandwidth, add connections, and aggregate across network links safely and securely, giving multiple seamless failover options. The single management platform provides admins with quicker response times to all change requests and any incidents that may occur on the network. Ultimately, with Stonesoft NGFW and centralized firewall management, Cobweb is now equipped with the tools to manage network security holistically in real-time mode, utilize shared network connections, and benefit from shared logging, reporting, auditing, and other tools. Ease-of-use makes Stonesoft NGFW an effective and efficient security solution, saving valuable time and resources for Cobweb. “No more standing in cold data centers for hours configuring a firewall or performing upgrades. Forcepoint Stonesoft Next Generation Firewall does 99% of our network configuration, reducing what used to take hours to minutes. Everything is done through the management platform. I am one happy customer.” — Dyer Cobweb has relied on Forcepoint solutions since 2012.

The results with Forcepoint NGFW have been extraordinary – outstanding performance, lower costs, and, most important, considerably fewer invasions. Hendrik Walter IT Director Avency OVERVIEW Avency is a B2B digital services provider based in Telgte, Germany. The company is an independent ISP with more than 20 years of experience in providing online and various datacenter services. Avency provides domain, mail, hosted security and cloud services and builds and designs online applications. Avency currently hosts more than 1,200 websites/applications and 7,000 domains for a wide range of businesses including retail, social media, manufacturing, and nance. Avency’s focus on data center security is a key differentiator from other hosting companies. CHALLENGE As IT director for Avency, Hendrik Walter is also Forcepoint’s first Accredited Channel Engineer (ACE) for NGFW in Germany. Walter and his team made a large investment in a proprietary ISP system that makes it completely independent and autonomous. Naturally, high availability and security were large concerns, particularly with regard to intrusion prevention and data loss prevention. To meet its ongoing security requirements, the company decided to migrate its data center from Check Point to a more suitable solution. SOLUTION Avency ultimately chose to implement Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) with the Forcepoint Security Management Center (SMC). “After an extensive market evaluation, we realized that Forcepoint NGFW would offer superior performance, evasion protection, and cost benefits. Forcepoint is the only solution that offers mature multitenant capabilities. Plus, it offers a lower total cost of ownership since the SMC license includes built-in features that competitors lack.” — Hendrik Walter, IT Director, Avency Protected by Forcepoint NGFW, Avency offers several levels of security-based services to its clients. The most comprehensive is Managed Firewall Services, in which customers rent their firewalls from Avency and have full access to the SMC. Through Forcepoint NGFW’s multitenancy capabilities, Avency is able to provide each client with its own secure, separate domain that is inaccessible to other clients. Customers can access the SMC to manage their own firewalls, or they can contract with Avency to provide firewall management as needed. “With the domain management features of Forcepoint NGFW and the well-engineered role systems in SMC, the solution is multitenant in every way. With the reporting tool, clients can automatically receive weekly or monthly reports about attacks, traf c, and all other events.” — Walter Through Avency’s Datacenter Firewall Services, customers outsource their IT infrastructures to Avency but maintain access to their rules, policies, and logs. These capabilities are powered by the SMC’s subrule feature and Web Portal Server. Also through the SMC’s Web Portal Server, Avency offers a Web Hosting service that enables customers to view live log data. Armed with this data, clients can troubleshoot connection/speed issues and stay informed of attacks targeting their Web applications. RESULTS With the built-in exibility of Forcepoint NGFW, Avency is able to write its own signatures and correlations in order to provide a perfect t with customer use cases. “The solution’s extremely robust log and reporting functionality, coupled with best-in-class alert and escalation management, means we can react three times faster to incidents than we could before. Also, the centralized management, API functionality, and intelligent domain/user model mean that admins and customer can work simultaneously on their own rules and elements.” — Walter As Avency built momentum for its in-house use of Forcepoint NGFW, customers began to take notice. “Our clients were curious as to how we could offer these efficient and flexible security services at such a competitive price point. This prompted us to use our experience and confidence in the products to become a Forcepoint NGFW reseller.” — Walter Through its Forcepoint NGFW reseller services, Avency actively monitors the customer rewalls around the clock and contacts the clients when critical events occur. “Clients pay only a fixed monthly fee. Even with only a small budget, they’re able to get best-in-class firewall protection with expert management, and without having to make a high upfront investment. Our results with Forcepoint NGFW have been extraordinary – outstanding performance, lower costs, and, most important, considerably fewer invasions. Forcepoint is the right partner with which to grow our firewall security business.” — Walter Avency has relied on Forcepoint solutions since 2012.