Arun District Council eliminates network outages

West Sussex local authority Arun District Council has taken on a new IT security and business continuity system to avoid internet outages and maintain network uptime.

The council recently tendered for a cost-effective replacement IT security system to support its work on behalf of Arun's 114,500 citizens.

It decided to upgrade its security and network management systems with StoneGate secure connectivity and firewall technology from Stonesoft after a recent outage of internet services across the council highlighted the danger of single points of failure.

"The outage would have meant the loss of our major link to the internet," said Mark Slade, head of the network management team at Arun District Council. "Fortunately with StoneGate firewalls in place connectivity failed over to our secondary link with no problem at all."

The recent staged deployment of the StoneGate appliances and services now provide Arun with perimeter security, business continuity, intrusion detection and virtual private network (VPN) connectivity.

The deployment specifically overcomes the single point of failure created by internet service provider (ISP) connections. The StoneGate Firewall is increasing Arun's network security and business continuity, while Stonesoft's multi-link technology also overcomes a number of availability and latency issues sometimes associated with public networks.

Slade is already considering upgrading StoneGate appliances and services with an eye to future expansion. "Ultimately it's about minimising any future downtime for our users. Nobody likes to be without services they rely on every day," he said.

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