|
Online travel portal MakeMyTrip.com has been among the most
successful Internet companies that provides services for the leisure and
small-business traveler, backed by real-time booking ability. Growing at a rapid
pace from 2003 onwards it emerges as one of the foremost travel websites in the
'US to India' travel market. It meets the challenges of travel management in
the wake of increased security threats. Adopting a unified approach towards
security with a Unified Threat Management (UTM) appliance, the company has been
able to build a secure environment with ease of manageability.
How to Manage Security
According to Puneet Sharma, deputy manager, Technology, MakeMyTrip.com,
being a major player in the online travel vertical, it required a gateway
protection solution that had firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam and content
filtering. Before the UTM deployment the company did not have any security
solution in place. However, it required a robust security set-up to take care of
the growing security risks and the requirements. Furthermore, the dynamics of
its online operations and the huge traffic of visitors to the portal warranted
its own set of requirements like bandwidth management, etc.
 One of the areas that required attention was the growing number
of emails, which brought with it the challenge of managing the growing number of
spams and viruses that came with it. Spyware blocking was critical for the
company due to the financial and confidential nature of the online transactions.
"We cannot afford any down time, so we needed the solution to manage the
multiple ISP links. Plus, speed in transactions was important, so bandwidth
management and web cache were important too. In short, we were looking for a
comprehensive Internet security solution," says Sharma.
The company was reluctant to deploy multiple solutions
considering the cost factor as well as the complexity in managing multiple
vendors and solutions. According to Sharma, "We did not want multiple
solutions. They would translate to unnecessary multiple initial and operational
overheads. We needed something that was easy to configure and easy to maintain
and simple." He further explains that while cost was a big factor, the
complexities involved in coordinating with multiple vendors and managing
different solutions and boxes was also an issue. "With a single box there
are lesser chances of the vendors passing on the blame for any failure in their
box to the other vendor's box. The chances of vendors playing the blame game
are not there." Therefore, a UTM proved to be a cost effective solution for
the company's requirements.
Comprehensive Solution
MakeMyTrip.com considered various alternatives before zeroing in on Cyberoam, a
user identity based UTM, for the UTM solution. The primary criteria for
selecting the UTM vendor was the vendor's willingness to carry a two months
demo before going ahead with the solution. The company wanted to be first
convinced about the effectiveness of the solution and its features before
zeroing in on the final solution. The Cyberoam solution met the criteria of
doing the two months demo first and also the endowed with the features needed
for the company. The other vendors were not convinced about going for a rigorous
demo.
"The Cyberoam solution proved to be a panacea as it was
tailor-made for our UTM requirement. The solution's user-friendliness was
proven quite effectively when it blended seamlessly into our company's
existing network," said Sharma. The solution was finally deployed in
May-June 2005 and MakeMyTrip.com integrated Cyberoam with its existing active
directory services (ADS). This saved the added effort of creating all the users
individually on the UTM.
|
|
| Unified
Approach: With a UTM appliance, the company has
been able to build a secure environment with ease of manageability |
The seamless integration of the solution with the domain server
and its identity-based nature drilled down to revealing the individual user's
identity and also provided an absolute control over the full gamut of security
features provided by the UTM.
Identity-based Solution
In case of an abuse the identity-based security solution enables the
organization to isolate the source of trouble instantly. The identity-based
nature not only reveals the face behind an IP address, but also helps in
promoting responsible end-user behavior in the office staff, explains Sharma.
Cyberoam has enabled to create customized identity-based
policies, which helps in selectively providing Internet access and downloading
rights to users according to their working needs. One can even specify and
regulate the amount of downloads that a group of users are allowed and at what
time. The user identity-based intelligent reporting helps in keeping a tab on
the end-user behavior and spot anomalies quickly. This also helps to remodel the
user's policies if required.
Creating user identity-based policies also helps to apply
customized policies for application controls. So there is an absolute control
over all the network applications running in the intranet of the company.
According to Sharma, "Cyberoam's identity-based UTM provides us the
reassurance that our corporate IT assets are being used effectively and focused
on our business, all the time."
The multi-link manager and bandwidth management solutions have
proven to be quite useful to the organization. MakeMyTrip.com has two ISP links
terminating at Cyberoam UTM. The multi-link manager manages both the links,
distributing the traffic in such a way that the better link gets the priority.
The solution also looks after load balancing and gateway failover. The link with
the larger bandwidth is given priority according to a user defined load ratio.
In case of a link failure, the solution automatically switches the traffic to
the working link. So the organization gets a transparent multi-link management
with the least amount of human intervention.
The bandwidth management module allows the organization to
assign a specific amount of bandwidth to a group of users, leading to optimal
usage of the total available bandwidth. The web cache module also helps reduce
bandwidth consumption and speeds up download.
Sharma finds the success rate of the anti-virus and anti-spam
solutions impressive at almost 99%. The crucial mail-scanning feature is also
very effective.
According to Sharma, all the features of the UTM solution are
critical in creating a strong and robust security set up. However, among them
URL filtering and anti-spam are the most widely used and critical features. The
URL filtering feature helps in restricting the users up to their business
requirements. Thereby, helping to improve their productivity.
Shipra Arora
shipraa@cybermedia.co.in Page(s) 1
| 
Print
Comment
Email
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Twitter
