As one of the premier councils in Australia's fastest-growing region, South East Queensland, it’s no surprise that Logan City Council (LCC) places a high value on cost-effective, innovative IT solutions to help improve service delivery and meet business goals.

A recent infrastructure upgrade project undertaken by LCC’s IT services provider, Priority 1 Solutions, has enabled the Council to meet its key strategic objectives.


THE CHALLENGE

A few years ago, one of LCC’s primary objectives was to improve service delivery by providing Internet-based solutions that enabled customers to access information online.

The council’s internal Information Systems Support division (ISS) was tasked with developing and rolling out the new breed of net-based back office and customer-facing applications. According to ISS team members, Peter Lecinski (Strategic Development & Projects Coordinator) & Wayne Grixti (Information Security Analyst), data security and network vulnerability were top priorities for the project.

“Our task was to make Council more accessible to its customers and maintain customer privacy,” Lecinski said. “The important information held by Council is extremely valuable to the outside world and there are very strict regulatory rules governing the protection of that information (data)."

“The only way we could achieve this without compromising our data security was via strong middleware and a strong, secure back-end system.”

THE SOLUTION

ISS addressed this by looking only at solutions that were considered industry standards. Following a thorough evaluation of its options, it selected Check Point — one of the world’s top three security protocols for business.

“Money was not really the main issue,” Lecinski said. “Our chief concerns were security and having access to Level 1 support locally. Check Point fitted both these criteria. It wasn’t the cheapest solution, nor was it the most expensive, but it was certainly the most highly recommended.”

Check Point was installed by a local systems integrator that was later replaced by LCC’s current IT partner, Priority 1 Solutions.

 
“When you sign on with an IT partner, you don’t just sign on with a company,” Lecinski said. “You should consider the people at the company and ask yourself — who are they? What is their capability and track record? What are their values and do these fit with ours?

“Priority 1 was recommended to us, so we looked at the calibre of their staff and decided to move to them about two years ago when our contract came up for renewal.”

More recently, ISS and Priority 1 Solutions undertook a dual-purpose project for LCC’s five public libraries.

“Each library has a server and PCs to deliver free computing and Internet services to the public,” Lecinski said. "Maintaining these environments across five locations was taking up a lot of ISS time and resources. In addition to this, the libraries wanted to enable communication between their catalogue system and the public network servers."

This of course raised issues of data security and network vulnerability.

“Any free, publicly available PC is a target for would-be hackers,” Lecinski explained. “We had to provide public access to some of Council’s corporate systems without risking the security of our corporate environment and ensure the libraries’ computing services remained up and running.”

Priority 1’s solution was to increase the security of LCC’s environment by upgrading Check Point and, in addition to this, create a secure, virtual private network (VPN) by replacing each library’s existing firewall with a Check Point VPN-1 Edge appliance.

It was during this upgrade project that the move to Priority 1 Solutions proved to be the right one.

IMPLEMENTATION

“The Check Point Firewall is one of our Tier One security applications,” Lecinski said. “Mishandling an upgrade of this magnitude could cripple our network.  Having the system down, even for a day, would be very serious and could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

“At the time, Priority 1 had not done this particular appliance installation. Rather than try and fake it, they were totally honest and suggested running a test environment at their office, at their own expense, until they were 100 percent satisfied it was safe for us to go live."

“They gave us an extremely high quality of service at no extra expense. At one stage, they even phoned to tell us not to switch over, rather than risk crippling us for the sake of meeting a deadline. I take my hat off to them for that.”

Rolling out a Check Point VPN-1 Edge appliance to each of the libraries also produced pleasing results. Based on past experience and a testing phase, ISS allocated four hours per library to install and configure the new devices — a total of 4.5 days. Priority 1 did the job in just one day.

RESULTS

The upgraded corporate firewall and new VPNs have produced a number of benefits for the ISS division, library staff and the public. Plus, there have been no successful hacks or break-ins to LCC’s corporate environment.

For ISS, the solution has led to reduced costs for providing support to the libraries.

“Check Point has given us remote access capability,” said Grixti “Rather than having to send someone out to five different locations, each with their own support issues to be fixed, it can all be done remotely."

“The solution also enables all our remote security needs to be managed centrally from our main corporate firewall server. Check Point has given us a lot more options as a support team, so from a support cost perspective our return on investment has been substantial.”

Lecinski agreed. “In terms of the time and man hours saved by the central management capability, Check Point has been a business enabler for both the libraries and Information System Services (ISS).”

Another benefit of the solution for ISS, has been Check Point’s instantaneous reporting capability.

“Our reporting is the best proactive tool we’ve ever had. The rule-base analysis report enables us to be pro-active, close up any back door vulnerabilities and make sure we are doing the right thing. The reports are granular and allow us to better understand the traffic passing through the system and the usage of our rule base."

“The level of security combined with our ability to continuously monitor the environment has freed us up to take on a more pro-active role within the organisation. Having the extra time on our hands (we wish) means that instead of reacting to events, we are able to be more futuristic/proactive and focus more on building more innovative and robust services for Council.”

While ISS is pleased with the results of its Check Point upgrade and VPN project, the greatest endorsement comes from ISS’ own customers, LCC’s own staff.

“We have a very high acceptance rate within the organisation in terms of our track record in delivering continuity of service,” Lecinski said.

Published Date: April 26, 2006 Printed from http://www.p1solutions.com.au/page/Case_Studies/Logan_City_Council/ © Priority One Solutions