Telecom Egypt safeguards corporate network with TippingPoint IPS

New solution helps to increase bandwidth availability by 40-70 percent

Telecom Egypt, the largest provider of fixed line services in the Middle East and Africa with 11.7 million subscribers (as at the end of December 2008), has implemented TippingPoint’s Intrusion Prevention Systems’ (IPS) to safeguard its corporate network. The new IPS allowed Telecom Egypt’s IT staff to block attacks and test security patches before deployment.

As one of the telecommunications market leaders in the region, Telecom Egypt owns and operates state-of-the-art IT infrastructure and network covering of all Egypt’s Governorates serving its subscribers. Telecom Egypt’s IT infrastructure includes hundreds of routers, switches, servers, and more than 8,000 computers.

Khaled Marmoush, CIO at Telecom Egypt reiterated that most organisations aren’t equipped to monitor the changing threats in the wild, analyze the data and revise security policies in a timely manner. “TippingPoint IPS gives our IT team the ability to anticipate threats and adjust our IPS policies based on our network security requirements. With TippingPoint, we can now eliminate malicious traffic from the network, manage non-mission critical application usage, ensure protection against subscriber-to-network and subscriber-to-subscriber attacks, and implement new and value-added services, confident that our security and network performance is assured,” Marmoush explained.

Ahmed Youssef, FVC’s GM for its Egyptian operations, said, “We worked closely with the IT team at Telecom Egypt as well as our partner, Raya Integration, to find the right solution to their needs. Securing Telecom Egypt’s on-going operations and IT infrastructure is a mission critical and a key focus area for the company’s IT department. Intrusion detection and prevention systems were deemed necessary to complement the company’s existing IT security policy and provide a secure environment for the corporate core applications and infrastructure.”

“The successful, high quality implementation of this project showcases our expertise in tailoring solutions to customers’ exact needs in the most professional and efficient manner,” commented Hisham Abdel Rasoul, Raya IT CEO. “Raya’s commitment to meet its customers’ rigorous demands is a major factor in it’s success.”

The new system also alleviated the network team’s need for ad-hoc and emergency patching. By continually cleansing the network of malicious and unwanted traffic, network performance was accelerated for mission critical applications, increasing bandwidth availability by 40-70 percent.

To implement the solution, the company’s IT team worked out of office hours and followed innovative plans to manage the deployment of the project. The project was completed within overnight and everything was back online before the start of the next business day. As a result, the team didn’t face any problems whatsoever with minimal downtime.

According to Ayman Ahmed, Local Area Network Manager at Telecom Egypt, the company was able to derive the best TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and value proposition from this implementation. The company today protects its data centres, network infrastructure including routers, switches and other mission critical infrastructure from targeted attacks and traffic anomalies, with TippingPoint’s IPS. Telecom Egypt can now eliminate malicious traffic from the network, manage non-mission critical application usage, ensure protection against subscriber-to-network and subscriber-to-subscriber attacks, and implement new and value-added services, confident that our security and network performance is assured.

Telecom Egypt’s next plans include working on a centralised management system for the IPS units. This will enable Telecom Egypt with discovering, monitoring, configuring, diagnosing and reporting on multiple TippingPoint systems. While that is being worked on, Telecom Egypt is targeting to scale its security systems, by deploying core controller to enable automated, in-line 10Gbps inspection, thus protecting network devices, operating systems and applications from various security attacks.

About FVC
Founded in 2000, FVC is one of the leading Value Added Distributors across the Middle East and North Africa with dedicated offices in United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt and Morocco, working through its growing network of more than 130 channel partners in over 44 countries across the region.

With new technologies and solutions driving the pace of change of businesses in the region, FVC has built a successful business by drawing on the best of global solutions. Uniquely in the region, its combination of full support for its channel partners and market-leading solutions from emerging technologies provides both FVC’s partners and their customers with the full confidence to invest in integrated next-generation IT and networking solutions from rich media communications to security to bandwidth management that will benefit their businesses. For more information on FVC, visit www.fvc.com.