Network Protection

Web Protection

Email Protection

Wireless Protection

Sandstorm Sandboxing

Web Server Protection

Secure Firewall Gateway Service Overview

Centiant working in conjunction with Sophos, have developed a next generation secure gateway firewall offering. This service provides a unified threat management solution incorporating Network, Wireless, Web, Email and Web protection. Providing features such as EAL4+ firewall and intrusion protection, Advanced Threat Protection, Content Management and Web application firewall’s. The service is based around an on premise appliance available in small, medium and large offerings. The same advanced features are provided on all sizes with the differentiator between the sizes being throughput.

Firewall protection and ease of use

We start as always with a conversation with the customer to gain an understanding of the network requirements both now and in the future. We look at the business requirements that may drive demand for LAN going forward include:

  • Wireless access requirements. Including the next generation of high speed wireless which may require LAN aggregation (providing two network connections to each Wireless Access Point) increasing the pressure on the network.
  • CCTV and other Power over network devices:- Power requirements including PoE, PoE+ and PoH
  • Building / Floor Consolidation:- As pressures mount on public sector bodies to achieve savings, and the ever increasing cost of providing office space. Many organisations are actively looking to consolidate floors / buildings, increasing density of user and putting increasing requirements on networks.
  • Once we have a good understanding of the customers’ business needs we determine the “baseline” number of ports required within each location. This baseline is the absolute minimum number of ports a customer needs within a single Hub room. From this baseline we add 50% expansion capacity to allow rapid expansion without having to add switches. The customer pays a one off fee for the installation of the stack, followed by a monthly service management fee and a price per port of £3 per month / port used. The customer can move between the baseline figure and the 50% expansion on a monthly basis only paying for the ports used that month.

Content Management

IT departments are facing the challenge of providing internet services to an increasing number of devices including guest and BYOD. With this comes the need to protect users and organisations from unsuitable content. Our service provides an answer to this challenge, by allowing IT departments to set multiple content management and advanced layer 7 policies, allowing content blocking by user groups and times.

Content management is set through a sophisticated category management system which allows an entire category to be blocked, allowed or warned again set at user / group level. These categories are constantly updated, blocking new sites as and when they appear. In addition to category management individual URL address can be blocked, and features such as safe search can be enforced.

Advanced Layer 7 application control allows specific features within applications to be block. This is becoming increasingly important with the growth of social media and its potential benefits and risks. A traditional content management system allow you to either block or allow sites such as Facebook but not manage the activities within. Our advanced layer 7 application control allows access to sites such as Facebook but blocks non business areas such as messaging and gaming.