"Thanks to our partnership with 6WIND, Arkoon has
been able to combine the advantages of integrated routing and
security within the same appliance, reinforcing the enhancement
capabilities of our product range," said Etienne Coulon,
Arkoon's VP of Marketing. |
Resulting Benefits
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Working with the solution offered by
6WIND, Arkoon met its product roadmap goals successfully.
They were able to enhance their UTM FAST360® appliance
range within four months integrated with advanced and competitive
dynamic routing features.
With the optimized development process
on networking taken care of, Arkoon reinforced its security
value-add by developing two additional patented FAST modules
for more comprehensive filtering of SQLnet and SNMP flows.
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Case Study
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Arkoon is a European leader of Unified Threat
Management (UTM) solutions for enterprise networking. The
company offers a complete and homogeneous product line of multifunction
security appliances (firewall, VPN, IDPS, antivirus) to protect
a company's communications infrastructure, information integrity
and user authentication.
It has more than 5500 installed appliances in
50 countries. The real-time technology developed by Arkoon,
combined with a modular and evolutionary architecture, guarantees
the best security-performance ratio in the market, lowering the
costs of ownership at the same time.
Market Challenges
The lines between networking equipment segments
and security equipment segments are blurring fast. Major
network equipment providers have entered the security space to offer
unified or integrated security with routing and other LAN/WAN connectivity
functionalities. The reason is simple: growing enterprise
customer demands. Enterprise IT managers in highly-regulated
verticals like banking and finance, defense and security, with flourishing
branch offices increasingly need to optimize their TCO by consolidating
security optimization and routing into the same box at the network
gateway as well as for the whole infrastructure.
The aggressive competition from networking equipment
vendors represents both a threat and a new market opportunity for
Arkoon. The advantage to Arkoon is that security remains
the heart of enterprise customers' business risk-management concern. As
Arkoon evolves its network security offering to integrate new customer
demands on routing, without losing sight of its specialized value-add,
it becomes better placed to be competitive and to gain new revenues
from the fast-evolving networking pie.
Product Development
Implications
In the bid to deliver their security appliances
integrated with dynamic routing, Arkoon had two development options. The
first was to have their engineers develop in-house the required
routing protocols for RIP, OSPF and BGP but that would have meant
a good 12 months before going to market. The compounded
risk was their engineers would have been stretched and diverted
from their core competence of developing enhanced network security
solutions.
So the plan called for a second option: partnering
or outsourcing to a networking software specialist able to deliver
on Arkoon's specific technology criteria to ensure development process
optimization:
- Comprehensive routing features for easy integration within
Arkoon's security software
- Ready porting on Arkoon's choice of hardware processor
and performance
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Solution
Choosing 6WIND's value-proposition, Arkoon opted to:
- Leverage 6WIND's field-proven networking software technology
already pre-integrated and validated on Arkoon's choice
of x86 hardware reference design. This enabled
Arkoon to develop a whole range of routing-aware appliances
based on a single optimized reference design.
- Develop in parallel new security features while 6WIND
handled the routing integration, really optimizing the development
process to reduce overall time to market.
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