Hereford & Worcester Fire & Rescue Authority

Case Study

The Background

Hereford & Worcester Fire & Rescue Authority (HW Fire) provides emergency services to over three quarters of a million people across the counties of Herefordshire and Worcestershire, attending over 9,000 incidents each year. It has an establishment of over 300 full time operational staff, more than 300 retained (part time) staff, 20+ Fire Control staff, as well as around 100 non-uniformed support staff. HW Fire operates from a custom designed facility on the outskirts of Worcester.

The Requirement

 

How many users/computers do you support and how are they spread out?

We have 30 sites including the service head quarters in Worcester, operational logistics (fleet and equipment maintenance), an Urban Search and Rescue facility, five wholetime stations, three day crewed stations and 19 retained stations. 
Our servers headquarters and business continuity site (Disaster Recover) are linked via a 100Mbit private leased circuit. Our whole time stations and linked via 2Mbit megastream links. All remaining sites use ADSL and IPSEC VPN links. Our topology is based around a hub and spoke (star) network.


We have approximately 840 users spread across the 30 sites and approximately 250 PCs and Laptops and 130 servers.

What environment is your Smoothwall product running in?

We operate in primarily a Microsoft Windows environment for users with a number of Linux based support servers. It is a mixed environment of both physical and virtual machines.

What type of user authentication do you use?

We use Active Directory Authentication.

What was the problem that needed to be solved, that required you to look for a new system?

We have a number of defined requirements for our systems which operate in two main areas of the service.

Primary Fire Service Network

1. Robust and reliable protection for the organisation both internally and externally against the latest security threats and network attacks.
2. An Active Directory compatible web filtering system for monitoring and censoring Internet access, which is flexible enough to block any unsuitable contents in line with our Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP). At the same time resilience must be built in for high availability and failover to our business continuity site.
3. Connectivity of our day crewed and retained stations via a secure VPN link integrated with existing Cisco infrastructure and the option of a standby fail-over to our business continuity site.
4. A secure DMZ for hosting web service, managing external access and filtering email contents.

Fire Control

We have recently relocated our fire control which now operates inside our corporate network. To ensure high levels of security a second firewalled network was created inside our own. Our main focus as a fire service with the network was high availability.

1. A secure, resilient firewall which would protect the network against all attacks.
2. A high availability solution with 100% redundancy.
3. The ability two securely route between the two networks.
4. The ability to allow external access limited to our fire control network and not our corporate network.
5. A non-Microsoft based product as with our primary infrastructure to meet the Code of connection requirements for access to the GSi network

Why did you choose Smoothwall?

Having experience with Smoothwall express and wanting a Linux based firewall system it seemed the obvious choose when we initially chose Smoothwall 7 years ago. Since then their high level of support and continued development of the system has given us no reason to look at other providers. The modular based system also allows us to just pay for those systems we required on the different hardware devices.

What has your Smoothwall product enabled you to do?

Meet all of our requirements.

Did we replace a solution from another company? Or who did we compete with?

Are you dealing directly with Smoothwall or through one of our Partners?

We deal directly with Smoothwall.

Do you have any comments about the quality of service you received from Smoothwall or our Partners?

Exceptional levels of support, always very friendly and helpful. More recently we have had to make a number of changes to the base Smoothwall system to enable the successful integration of our fire control network, Smoothwall support we able to meet all our requirements and make the necessary changes.

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