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A Hybrid Solution
With 700 lawyers in 10 U.S. offices and an office in Brussels, Belgium, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal must provide secure access to documents and data. Hansen and staff looked at some pure-play security point solutions and other options, only to stay with incumbent security supplier IBM Internet Security Systems. (IBM bought ISS, an Atlanta-based provider of network protection, intrusion detection and monitoring tools and service, for $1.3 billion last year.)
Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal now uses ISS's preemptive protection platform to secure some 3,000 devices on its network. "If you buy a bunch of point solutions, costs go up," Hansen says. "We have to find the proper way to deploy it, so we pushed [security] closer to the actual wire than at the operating system layer."
And so Hansen isolated virtual LANs within each geographical location and guaranteed QoS to the port level. The network shares the same switch but runs different LANs off it. All the various sites use IP to communicate with each other with the same QoS, but in these cases traffic goes from router to router and passes data on the same connection.
"We have a framework of security that we implement, and if possible we avoid point solutions," Hansen says. "If I can come back to ISS, who I've had forever, and say, 'Here's what we're doing and what we need.' Sometimes we have to wait, but we end up getting what we want." The law firm also uses a lot of gear from Avaya Inc.
Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal also limits exposure by taking a hybrid approach to VoIP and traditional PBXes. Indeed, many midmarket companies use VoIP internally but still connect to the outside universe through standard PBXes.
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