Firewall upgrade helps Virgin Media boost application availability

Virgin Media has streamlined firewall management

Virgin media has adopted a new security lifecycle management system to deal with bottlenecks caused by network traffic moving across firewalls in its datacentre.

The company’s IT difficulties were compounded by recent merger and acquisition activity that fragmented its network management setup.

Virgin Media UK corporate network manager Colin Miles said: "The organisation had a disparate infrastructure estate which threw up many problems in terms of firewall rules and stability."

Miles said: “In addition, some of the platforms were being badly managed due to lack of skill, while others were getting towards end-of-life and end-of support.”

He added: “We needed to get these firewalls running and able to pass traffic because the problems were having a direct impact on our external customers. Even though it's an internal service, there's a requirement for real-time updates for the team to service external customers.”

After a review of the solutions available and with help from security partner Nebulas Solutions, the company opted for Tufin’s SecureTrack system.

The company ran a 30-day technical trial of the solution which proved successful. Miles said: “Tufin’s SecureTrack provided visibility into Virgin Media’s firewall operations through a unified user interface. This allowed efficient change tracking, risk analysis and optimisation of firewall operations.”

The company has also been able to clean up unused rules in its rule sets without disrupting business operations.

Tufin’s system resolved a number of Virgin Media’s firewall problems - for example it identified one rule that was soaking up 10 per cent of the firewall CPU processing power.

Miles explained that giving that rule a higher priority meant the rest of the rule sets didn’t have to be executed. “This also resolved some of the stability issues we’d been experiencing too,” said Miles.

Virgin Media has reduced the amount of administration it performs on managing firewall rule sets by 30 per cent since deploying the technology.

Our IT team now uses its free time to adopt a more proactive stance as opposed to the reactive one we had previously taken,” said Miles.