Eurosport Standardizes its Network Security on Fortinet

Fortinet’s Solutions Enable Wired and Wireless Network Security to the Pan-European Sport TV Channel across 17 countries

MALAYSIA, March 28, 2013 ― Fortinet - a world leader in high-performance network security - today announced that Eurosport, the number one pan-European TV sport network, has deployed the company’s FortiGate network security appliances to protect a network of 1,000 employees across 17 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Eurosport also implemented Fortinet’s FortiAP wireless access points to provide secure Wi-Fi access to its employees. Fortinet products were chosen primarily for their performance, redundancy capabilities and ease of management and deployment.

Eurosport broadcasts in 20 languages and reaches 130 million homes across 54 countries. The Eurosport Group headquarters are located in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, and has 17 offices across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, located in the following countries: Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Poland, Spain, UK (two offices), Greece, Portugal, UAE, Japan and Hong Kong.

In 2012, Eurosport Group decided to replace its existing Check Point and Juniper firewalls with a solution that could integrate firewall, SSL VPN and offer more flexibility in terms of management and administration. After conducting an analysis of competing solutions, Eurosport’s IT department selected Fortinet’s FortiGate network security appliances for the following reasons: the product line offered a full range of performance levels that adapted to the requirements of the different sites; those performance levels were three times higher than the ones found using Check Point technology; the appliances offered simple and cost-effective redundancy options and key features such as identity-based authentication for every user and firewall configuration, as well as ease of management and administration.

“We are present in 17 countries but don’t have technical resources available in each location. This is why our priority was ease of administration and management. Fortinet was the only vendor to fully meet our requirements thanks to its ability to configure and update the device with a simple USB key,” said Thierry Landeau, network and security project manager at Eurosport. “In order to configure the appliances located in Tokyo for instance, we emailed the setup file and firmware that we wanted to integrate in the devices, and our sales team in the Tokyo agency transferred those files onto a USB stick that they connected to the Fortinet appliance before turning it on. Five minutes later, the FortiGate device was operational.”

Due to high bandwidth requirements, three Fortinet clusters were deployed at Eurosport’s headquarters in France: The first cluster included two FortiGate-1000C appliances, and the other two clusters consisted of two FortiGate-200B appliances. In addition, fifteen FortiGate-80C clusters were deployed in agencies located in: the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, UAE, Japan and Hong Kong. And, to address the bandwidth requirements of the larger offices counting around fifty employees, four FortiGate-110C clusters were deployed in the agencies located in the UK, Germany and Sweden.

With the proliferation and increasing use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets on its corporate network, Eurosport Group decided to provide secure wireless Internet access to its employees and, in particular, to its sales team, so that they could effectively demonstrate the Eurosport services available on mobile platforms. Again, the IT department opted for Fortinet rather than a wireless network security specialist, such as Aruba Networks:

“Since Fortinet’s FortiGate appliances are equipped with wireless controllers, we decided it made logical sense to choose Fortinet’s FortiAP wireless access points in order standardize on vendors at Eurosport and avoid multiple licenses and administration,” said Pascal Delorme, system, network and telecoms manager at Eurosport.

“Fortinet’s FortiAPs perfectly address our requirements in terms of mobility optimization as they have allowed us to standardize on Wi-Fi, that is to say, assign the same name and the same SSID to each user across all agencies. So now, an employee at Eurosport Group who usually connects to Wi-Fi in the Paris office, can log into any other agency within the group with the same SSID and password,” said Nicolas Perrault, network and security engineer at Eurosport.

To date, 23 FortiAP-220B wireless access points have been deployed across the different agencies.

The deployment of the FortiGate and FortiAP devices has been happening gradually at the remotes sites since April 2012, and the implementation is now in its final phase. All solutions are remotely managed from the headquarters in France using a FortiManager™-100C centralized management system. Reporting is handled through the FortiAnalyzer™-400B, which allows Eurosport to securely collect the daily logs from the FortiGate appliances and generate technical reports and statistics on security events.

“We are very proud to count Eurosport Group among our customers. By deploying Fortinet’s solutions, they have now extended security and control over their entire infrastructure, while benefiting from optimized costs as well as ease of management and administration,” said Dato’ Seri George Chang, Fortinet’s regional vice president for Southeast Asia & Hong Kong. “We consider ourselves an end-to-end security partner to global companies such as Eurosport Group by delivering the most complete, high-performance integrated appliances and critical security services in the enterprise today.”