Hannoush Jewelers is a company whose philosophy has always been one of family ownership and personal attention to detail. Under the careful guidance of the Hannoush family, the first Hannoush Jewelers store opened its doors in Massachusetts in 1980. Today, the Hannoush Jewelers network includes more than 50 company-owned and franchised stores located throughout the United States.
The Challenge
Hannoush Jewelers Inc. a jewelry manufacturer and retailer, was using frame relay, a private network, but decided to cut costs by moving to VPN tunnels to connect their many stores and offices. Their current VPN firewall solution was unable to accomodate all 70 of their locations, leaving the company vulnerable to hackers, viruses and spam. Gary Savard, System Administrator, Hannoush Jewelers explains, "We have retail outlets and offices all over the country, and we needed to be sure that all of our remote locations were secure."
The Requirements
Savard's top priority was creating secure VPN tunnels to all of the company's retail and office locations. He was also looking for a stable product that could provide flexible content filtering to all of their locations. With so many locations distributed over a large geographic region, it was also important that network protection for each location could be managed from a single office and that content filtering was customizable for each location. Savard previewed several network security solutions, including SonicWall, and considered continuing to use their current firewall "but these products wouldn't accomodate all our locations and provide us with the content filtering we required."
The Solution
Hannoush Jewelers implemented two Astaro Security Gateway 425s as hardware appliances at their headquarters and an Astaro Security Gateway 110 at each of their 70 remote locations, including franchise stores. Savard also deployed the Astaro Command Center 2.0 at their headquarters to manage their entire network security from a central location. Savard decided to implement Astaro Security Gateway because of its flexible VPN capabilities and the stable and flexible content filtering as well as the ease of setting up the devices, "We were able to get the 425s up and running within minutes, and connecting to the first store also took only a few minutes," explained Savard.
Success with Astaro
The content filtering provided by the Astaro Security Gateways has reduced the amount of time Savard spends cleaning up viruses and malware from his network. "Some of our stores do not have content filtering, and we see a huge difference between the amounts of malware at the unfiltered stores as opposed to the filtered. The networks that have content filtering don't get any malware on their system," said Savard. Savard is also confident that as his network grows, the Astaro Security Gateway will continue to protect his network. "It takes very little time to set up and secure additional VPN tunnels to remote locations," he said. This makes it possible to secure additional franchises and remote offices as they are added to the network and ensures that Hannoush's growth is supported by their network capabilities. Additionally, the automatic Astaro Up2Date mechanism Savard was initially attracted to is beneficial to the company, "We've received regular product updates since implementing the Astaro Security Gateway, so I am confident the units are highly secure and full of new features with each update."
