Fortinet rolls out security solutions for NCCPL

Fortinet today announced that the National Clearing Company of Pakistan Limited (NCCPL), a significant institution of Pakistan’s Capital Market, has deployed FortiGate integrated network security appliances and FortiClient endpoint software to address a broad array of security requirements and secure mission critical systems at its head offices and disaster recovery site.

The Pakistani institution opted for Fortinet’s solutions over others for their security features, performance and ease of use.

NCCPL is a significant part of Pakistan’s Capital Market, providing clearing and settlement services to the Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad stock exchanges in the country. The goal of NCCPL is to contribute towards an economically stronger and more prosperous Pakistani Capital Market.

As the company deals with highly sensitive and confidential capital market data, the biggest challenge is to have a secure network that provides multiple modes of connectivity such as site-to-site, remote user, authentication, among others. In addition, as the company uses Internet, it is facing a multitude of IT threats on a daily basis.

To address those challenges, NCCPL evaluated a variety of security solutions and chose Fortinet’s security solutions due to their high throughput, high availability, ease-of-use and comprehensive security features included into a single appliance.

“Our goal was to setup the security infrastructure with the latest equipment, operating system and firmware, so it could meet all of our security requirements. Using Fortinet’s solutions we’ve found our network more streamlined and optimized than before. All devices are setup in Nat mode (L3 mode) with multiple features such as default gateway, routing, policies etc.” explained Shafiq ur Rehman, Chief Information Officer at National Clearing Company of Pakistan Limited.

NCCPL is relying on Fortinet’s FortiGate network security platform as its core security application for its mission critical National Clearing and Settlement System – a nation-wide application for the capital market providing settlement of shares and money to the members of the three stock exchanges. Eight FortiGate-300C platforms are deployed at its disaster recovery site and regional offices in Lahore & Islamabad whereas two FortiGate-800C appliances are deployed at the core data centre. The FortiGate appliances work in tandem with Fortinet’s FortiManager-200D centralised management and FortiAnalyzer-300D to gather the logs of the FortiGate platforms. Both FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer systems are deployed at Karachi headquarters. In addition, Fortinet’s FortiClient endpoint software is deployed, as needed, at locations such as its head-office, branches and customer premises. Finally, the institution has also subscribed to Fortinet’s FortiGuard services in order to have a comprehensive security solutions and combat day-to-day threats at the content and network level.

These appliances are managed by a technical team consisting of six engineers. The team is able to administer the appliances with ease because of the intuitive and user-friendly GUI. “Beyond securing our network, data and users, while it is not possible to quantify in terms of man hours or dollar values, Fortinet’s solutions have also noticeably streamlined and reduced our management overheads”, added Rehman.

Fortinet’s solutions were deployed over the course of two months and protect now over 800 users at multiple locations.