NG Firewall Replaces Cisco at Large Retail Automotive Center

Flow Companies

Industry:  Retail (Automotive)

Network Size:  17 locations with 50 to 250 servers, desktops and laptops. Overall there are 1,300 users and up to 75 remote workers on the network.

“Untangle’s support team is awesome. They helped us get up and running in no time.”

Background

Flow Companies is a mid-sized automotive retail center that offers pre-owned vehicles and also represents 20 car manufacturers in the North Carolina and Virginia areas. Chuck Young is the Director of Information Technology at Flow Companies and has been with the company since 2002.

Pricey and Ineffective Cisco

Providing safe and secure Wi-Fi to its employees and guests is of top importance to Chuck Young at Flow Companies. Their existing Cisco ASA dual firewalls were not solving Chuck’s two main problems: first, enabling employee communications between the numerous locations; second, blocking and filtering unwanted traffic from entering and exiting the network. So Chuck began researching alternative options and stumbled across Untangle NG Firewall.

“With Untangle’s NG Firewall solution, I am able to run it on my existing hardware, saving me a tremendous amount of money, as I need dedicated hardware at each of my 17 locations,” said Chuck. After a quick trial, Chuck was able to cherry pick the applications that he needed for his network.

NG Firewall to the Rescue

To keep customers’ data safe, he set up two ‘virtual’ racks, one for employees and one for guests. With Policy Manager, guests are directed to the guest Wi-Fi, and, in conjunction with Web Filter, are blocked from accessing inappropriate content on the network. Web Filter has control over 99.9% of all URLs and groups them into filtering categories for Chuck to choose from. Virus Blocker protects both his employees and customers from threats, malware, trojans and more with automatic real-time updates.

To solve the communication issue between sites, OpenVPN is used to enable employees to log into the corporate network, no matter where they are. To keep both the guest and employee networks up and running 24×7, WAN Failover and WAN Balancer were implemented to distribute traffic across multiple connects and maximize the bandwidth. “We have on average 50 to 1000 devices on our guest Untangle networks at each location,” said Chuck. “Often we are asked ‘why does my laptop perform so much faster when at your dealerships?’.”

With NG Firewall’s simple setup and intuitive administration, Chuck has been able to save at least 70% compared to their Cisco implementation. “We are able to support the Untangle solution with less resources, simply because it runs itself.”