About SJASC
Saint Joseph Abbey is a Catholic religious community of Benedictine monks. The mission of all Benedictine monks is "Ora et Labora", in English, "Prayer and Work". For the "Work" aspect of their religious lives, the monks have three primary apostolates. Pennies for Bread is an outreach to the community, baking loaves of bread and delivering them to various organizations for distribution to the poor and needy. The Christian Life Center is a retreat center that is available to the community at large and serves a large number of groups throughout each year. Finally, Saint Joseph Seminary College is an accredited college focused on the education and formation of men who are discerning a possible vocation to the Roman Catholic priesthood.
The Challenge
Saint Joseph Abbey and Seminary College in Louisiana was using several separate products to help protect their network, filter content and monitor Internet usage. Their perimeter firewall was handled by a Cisco ASA gateway, while all traffic passed through a Nortel router and was then filtered by Websense. Despite having three separate products implemented, this wasn’t enough to truly segregate traffic and it was difficult to determine when and where issues arose, as well as what was causing network slowdowns. The Cisco ASA did not provide Todd Russell, IT Director at Saint Joseph Abbey and Seminary College with enough information to conduct real-time analysis of network traffic and he found configuring the Websense product to be tedious yet lacking in options.
The Requirements
“I needed to replace the Websense product with a solution that would be easier to use and had better filtering controls,” said Russell. He was also looking for a solution that would allow him to quickly identify and diagnose problems as they occurred. Russell continued: “I also wanted to replace the Cisco firewall so I began looking for a solution that would allow me to manage all my network security and traffic concerns in one place.”
The Solution
Russell first heard of Astaro while listening to the Security Now! podcast and then again from a colleague at a nearby archdiocese. After installing the Astaro Security Gateway home use version at his home, Russell was impressed with its usability and power. “I installed the full version of the Astaro Security Gateway on hardware the seminary already owned, it has been running rock solid ever since,” explained Russell. He also installed the Astaro report manager to provide the additional insight into network he required.
Success with Astaro
Russell installed the Astaro Security Gateway software edition in one afternoon and “Within hours it was clear that much of our Internet saturation was caused by just a few machines with bittorrent and other P2P services running unknown to the users. If we hadn’t installed the Astaro we would have never known about these issues.” Russell was able to quickly lock down these problem machines and address the issues.
Replacing the three separate products with the Astaro Security Gateway was less costly and saved Russell time from managing his packet filtering, web filtering, bandwidth monitoring separately. “I quickly set up filtering profiles and haven’t had to touch them since. With our old solutions I would have to spend hours tweaking our configurations.” He was also pleased that the Astaro’s web interface was so intuitive that his assistant, who has only basic networking knowledge, could use it.
“Before installing Astaro the constant support complaints and network issues were too much to handle. Having the Astaro on our network has freed me up to focus on other areas of our technology that are more important. Astaro saved my sanity,” Russell explained.
As a final testament to his satisfaction, Russell continues to use the Astaro Security Gateway at home and frequently recommends the home edition to members of the seminary and college’s community. “I have a lot of faith in Astaro, otherwise I wouldn’t risk my reputation recommending it.”
