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New IT security system for council
Worthing Borough Council has overhauled and strengthen its connectivity and firewall infrastructure for its continuity and security related to online public services.
The council brought in Wide Area Networking company CI-Net in a three year contract to cover installation and ongoing management including dual, load-balanced clustered internet connections which automatically failover in the event of disaster, and a centralised jointly managed firewall with round-the-clock intrusion monitoring. Additionally a new Virtual Private Network (VPN) will support secure remote working for an increasing number of employees.
Mark Gawley, ICT services manager, said, “In the last few years we’ve seen a sharp rise in the number of council services delivered via the web – from council tax and housing benefit to a variety of leisure offerings. It’s essential to have a resilient and secure environment to keep public services online and employees productive. Because we’re handling people’s personal and financial information, security is paramount.”
Previously Worthing’s connectivity infrastructure had grown organically over a period of years into a complex environment. “We had around ten separate internet links and a variety of firewalls and web servers relating to different council business units,” said Gawley.
“We needed to simplify and centralise things in order to manage security more effectively and benefit from economies of scale. We saw a number of suppliers but CI-Net came up with the most straightforward cost effective solution, which is flexible enough to expand as our needs change."
During implementation, CI-Net kept the older connections and firewalls running in parallel while various council services and systems were transferred to the new infrastructure. The aim was to avoid disruption during the transition.
Also part of the CI-Net offering is a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN which is providing remote access to around 70 employees, including 37 local councillors. For additional security, all authorised staff are provided with VASCO two-factor authentication tokens. These generate unique security codes that must be used in order to log in to the network.
The VPN, which is built around an AEP Netilla Security Platform (NSP), has been configured to work with Windows Terminal Server to give staff web based access to desktop applications and the council intranet. It integrates with Windows active directory and CI-Net has configured it to do an automatic end-point scan of all remote devices to ensure they have up to date Anti-Virus protection before accessing council resources.
