Scotland’s Perth & Kinross Council Selects Enterasys to Secure IP Telephony Deployment

Andover, MA.

Enterasys Networks Inc., the Secure Networks Company™, today announced that Perth & Kinross Council, one of 32 unitary council areas in Scotland, has selected the Enterasys Secure Networks for VoIP solution to help prioritize and secure network traffic associated with the deployment of its new IP telephony and power over Ethernet (PoE) upgrade. Enterasys Matrix® switches, Dragon® distributed intrusion prevention and NetSight® Automated Security Manager software will help protect information assets among 50 remote government, education and institutional sites — dispersed over 600 square miles.

“When the Council decided to completely upgrade its voice infrastructure with IP telephony, our main objective was to ensure reliable performance,” said Rupert Carpenter-Jacobs, IST Engineer, Perth & Kinross Council. “We needed a way to proactively protect our voice, video and data services from internal threats. The Enterasys identity-based approach based on user authentication was a perfect fit and leveraged our existing infrastructure investments.”

An Enterasys customer of more than 20 years, Perth & Kinross Council is the local administrative and government council for the Perth & Kinross area of Scotland, responsible, amongst other things, for maintaining area nurseries, schools, refuse collection, town planning, social services and economic development. The Council’s network operations personnel support 300 network devices, connecting more than 3,000 government employees.

Although the network infrastructure contains multiple vendors – including 3Com, Cisco, Enterasys and Juniper – it was the proven track record of the Enterasys products and technical support team that made a lasting impression on the Council when they considered the new IP telephony upgrade.

“Enterasys makes great efforts to look after products once they’re installed and they constantly ensure backward compatibility. Their products have always been reliable to configure and operate,” added Rupert. “We hear mixed reviews about other industry vendors who shout a lot but don’t deliver as much.”

To protect the new IP telephony system, the IST team selected NetSight Automated Security Manager to automate threat containment — blocking and quarantining the attack — without disrupting the government applications. In addition, Enterasys’ Dragon IDS/IPS system will further enhance IT security by leveraging thousands of vulnerability and exploit-based signatures within its built-in threat library, as a basis of automated defense.

The IP telephony rollout was preceded by a migration from existing SmartSwitch™ 6000 Fast Ethernet switches to Enterasys Matrix N-series Gigabit/10 Gigabit switches and Enterasys® SecureStack™ B2 switches in smaller sites, all with PoE support. In the future, Enterasys D-Series switches are planned for deployment in conference rooms and instructional areas based on their small size, quiet operation, and support for Gigabit PoE connections. It is the reliability and stability of the combined hardware and software solutions that will enable the Council to deliver services that meet or exceed the needs of its users.

“Enterasys has a history with the Council of delivering well thought out, easy-to-use network solutions that are flexible and can adapt to any changes in complexity that develop in the course of conducting government business,” said Rupert Carpenter-Jacobs. “The Enterasys products work every day and that’s just the way it should be.”