By Amit Sharon, Head of Global Customer Community & Market Intelligence, Check Point Software

A consulting company gains cloud-based security operations integration and automation to transform operations. See how.

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AESI’s clients are electric utilities companies that rely on AESI for its cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, and operational technology expertise. I met with Kyle McCracken, System Administrator at AESI, to learn how they took the company’s security infrastructure to the next level while simultaneously simplifying operations.

AESI clients operate in a highly regulated industry and can be subject to stringent reliability and security requirements. As an advocate for its customers, AESI often works with vendor partner(s) to provide guidance to help shape upcoming solutions that meet the unique security and reliability needs of the industry. When support costs made their previous firewall solutions too costly to operate, AESI began looking for high-availability, next-generation security capabilities with a full range of controls.

Amit Sharon: AESI has migrated to a hybrid cloud environment. How did that affect your choice of security solutions?

Kyle McCracken: We needed comprehensive security coverage with automation to keep operations as efficient as possible. We chose Check Point Next Generation Security Gateways in a High Availability (HA) pair for the most advanced threat prevention with consolidated management. Check Point CloudGuard SaaS gives us much better protection for our Office 365 environment than our previous solution. Check Point SandBlast Agent simultaneously protects our endpoints. Cloud-based integration across all of our Check Point products makes management much easier. We know that capabilities are automatically updated to deliver the latest protection across everything from gateways to endpoints.

Amit Sharon: You’ve adopted Check Point R81. How is it helping you?

Amit Sharon: With COVID disrupting operations for many companies, how did you cope with the added security burden?

Kyle McCracken: Fortunately, with Check Point we were already prepared. Our team can easily manage everything remotely and securely. And with SandBlast Agent, our endpoint systems already had everything installed, including Remote VPN. We didn’t need to add a separate product. We didn’t have a single issue. As a bonus, I can check inventory of what’s installed on laptops—it’s a nice peace-of-mind feature.

Amit Sharon: How would you characterize your decision to adopt Check Point solutions?

Kyle McCracken: That’s easy—value. The time savings is huge for our team. They now can push updates and policy changes in seconds. We know that our security capabilities are current and consistent across our entire infrastructure, even in the face of a pandemic. With SandBlast Agent, we tailor policies any way that we want. We can turn on additional capabilities—like Capsule Docs and DLP—anytime without having to constantly negotiate new licenses or pay for things we don’t use. We get a lot of security value for our money.

Read the full story here.

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