..on-going costs with a new advanced Firewall from Redway Networks

Horsham District Council has improved network security and saved significant support costs with a new advanced firewall from Redway Networks. Redway Networks replaced the Council’s two inadequate legacy firewalls and complex infrastructure with a modern, simple to use Meraki MX cloud-managed security solution to simplify the network, reduce administration time and deliver a low total cost of ownership solution.

Horsham District Council provides a range of public services to residents and businesses throughout West Sussex. The Horsham District is a large area that covers 205 square miles of countryside, towns and villages and its services reach over 126,000 residents. With digital transformation accelerating and more services now online, Cyber-attacks were a concern for the Council, and this intensified during the pandemic and the increase of remote working.

Legacy Firewalls come to end of life

The Horsham District Council’s main office employs 550 staff and has around 300 users connecting to the network at the same time, either onsite or from home via Microsoft Direct Access. With digital services increasing and the need to keep its citizens and staff safe online, the Council needed to replace its legacy firewalls with a new, advanced firewall that would simplify its network and manage its security infrastructure more effectively.

Faz Sadough, Senior IT Engineer at Horsham District Council says:

“We were running two legacy firewalls, from different vendor solutions so this over complicated architecture was hard to manage. With both coming to end of life we needed a new firewall that had the capabilities to improve our depth of defence and give us complete control over the network via the cloud, so Cisco Meraki was the logical choice.”

The Council then set out to find an independent Meraki networking partner with experience in enterprise networking security. Faz says:

“I was recommended to Redway Networks and as soon as I spoke to them, I was instantly put at ease and knew they were the company we wanted to work with.”

Horsham selects Meraki from Redway Networks

Redway Networks delivered and installed the Meraki MX firewall over a weekend so that it didn’t affect the Council’s staff and Redway’s networking engineer configured the firewall and swapped over all the user accounts which made an instant improvement to network management.

Faz says:

“Redway Networks’ engineer was really flexible and went above and beyond to accommodate us ‘out of hours’ and I was really impressed with his technical knowledge, what he did in a day would have taken me weeks.”

The Cisco Meraki MX firewall includes all the advanced security services you’d expect from a next-generation firewall such as intrusion prevention, content filtering, anti-malware, geo-based firewalling, remote access connectivity, and advanced malware protection.

Amazing cost savings

Redway Networks delivered a complete consultation service from start to finish including design, implementation, documentation, testing and 5-year licence which includes cloud-access, firmware updates and 24x7 support from Meraki. The Council now has a modern, next-generation firewall that has increased its security posture and improved network management and scalability.

Faz says:

“Our new Meraki firewall has not only improved our security infrastructure but will save the Council around £30,000 in upgrade and support costs over the next five years based on what we were spending in support costs with our previous vendors.”

Future Requirements

Faz says:

“The service we received from Redway Networks was brilliant and I would absolutely recommend them 100%. Our goal is to expand our Meraki deployment throughout the entire network and once we get all the Meraki kit from Redway Networks, I will be able to see a full live picture of everything which is every network administrator’s dream.”