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Press Release
Rancho California Water District Controls Guests and Contractors, Improves Network Service Levels with ConSentry Networks
ConSentry LANShield Enables Network Visibility and Control, Malware Detection, and Compliance Enforcement
Milpitas, CA – November 12, 2007 – ConSentry Networks, the leader in secure switching, announced today that the Rancho California Water District (RCWD), serving 40,000 water customers in Southern California, has deployed the ConSentry LANShield™ solution to provide identity- and role-based access control, monitor and control application usage, and stop zero-day malware attacks and viruses from disrupting network services. With the ConSentry solution, the district is able to proactively address user and application issues to deliver a new level of network control, visibility, and security.
Formed in 1965, RCWD must ensure reliable water and wastewater system operations over a service area of 100,000 acres, which includes residents and businesses as well as agriculture and ranching activities. As a public entity, RCWD hosts public meetings routinely in its boardroom and has vendors and consultants working at its facility for varying periods of time. Given the network’s open access combined with a dynamic user base, “control was absolutely necessary,” said Dale Badore, the systems administrator for the Water District. “Without it, the network would not work.”
In addition to investigating how to accommodate visitors, vendors, and consultants using both wireless and wired access to the LAN, the district also wanted to gain greater network visibility into user and application behavior and prevent malware attacks and viruses from compromising network availability. The district needed to balance these requirements against its budget. Badore investigated other LAN security solutions, but the ConSentry LANShield platform proved superior with its wire-speed performance, agent-less approach to endpoint scanning, Layer 7 application visibility, malware detection, and extensive reporting capabilities.
Implemented as part of a larger network overhaul, the LANShield solution “was very helpful right from the beginning,” explained Badore. “The power it delivers to the network administrator is awesome. Nothing gets by these devices.”
Leveraging the LANShield platform’s identity-based control and authorization for users and groups, the water district today can quickly offer visitors controlled access to the LAN. It can also limit the propagation of specific chatty applications and control communications among different departments. Since the district has a customer credit card payment application on its external website, Badore plans to leverage the LANShield role-based LAN segmentation to ensure that only authorized employees have access to specific customer account and credit card data, incompliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS).
With ConSentry’s network visibility, Badore was able to identify some GIS workstations sending out a particularly heavy traffic load and tying up resources on servers in his data center. He then used the ConSentry platform to enforce a policy to block that GIS application from leaving that department. Because the LANShield platforms directly enforce that policy and simply drop the traffic in question, Badore was able to avoid the time-consuming and error-prone process of creating new virtual LANs (VLANs) and Access Control Lists (ACLs) to deal with the problem.
“Most important, without the LANShield devices, we wouldn’t have even seen that traffic, so we wouldn’t have known why these servers were getting taxed,” Badore noted. As a result of the ConSentry visibility, Badore does his job differently – for instance, he routinely checks the ConSentry InSight network and security status dashboards to learn of changes in user or application patterns. In addition to spotting aberrant behavior and controlling it where needed, this level of visibility has also enabled IT to demonstrate a concrete return on investment (ROI) for other network projects.
“We could show management how many people were accessing the new intranet we’d built,” said Badore. “We had the full count of how many users were going there, and how many times a day, and being able to prove that ROI was a big hit with management.”
With the LANShield embedded threat control, the Rancho California Water District has significantly reduced its malware by “hundreds of percents,” according to Badore, quickly isolating and limiting outbreaks and thereby increasing network availability.
Moving forward, Badore plans to use the solution’s reporting capabilities to develop new user guidelines and to enforce compliance with these guidelines.
“Like many of our customers, the district typifies the struggle of balancing between good business practices and the consequences of more open access,” noted Dean Hickman-Smith, vice president of worldwide sales at ConSentry. “The simplicity of ConSentry’s all-in-one approach makes it easier to address the security challenges presented with contractors, public network access, and malware containment as Rancho has done successfully.”
About Rancho Water
Formed in 1965, Rancho California Water District supplies an area consisting of approximately 150 square miles. The District serves the area known as Temecula/Rancho California, which includes the City of Temecula, parts of Murrieta, and other contiguous lands. The District is separated into two divisions: the Santa Rosa Division generally west of I-15 and Rancho Division generally east of I-15. The District currently provides sewer service to the Cal Oaks and Bear Creek areas.
“The mission of the Rancho California Water District is to deliver reliable, high-quality water, wastewater, and reclamation services to its customers and communities in a prudent and sustainable manner.”
About ConSentry Networks
ConSentry Networks delivers secure switching, enabling enterprises to control every user and secure every port on the LAN through its LANShield product family—the LANShield™ Switch, LANShield Controller, and InSight™ Command Center. More than 100 enterprises today rely on ConSentry’s award-winning secure-switching platforms to protect their corporate assets, ensure continuity of operations, and dramatically reduce the risk of security breaches. ConSentry is backed by blue-chip venture capital firms Accel Partners, DAG Ventures, INVESCO Private Capital, and Sequoia Capital; and is headquartered in Milpitas, California.
ConSentry Networks, the ConSentry Networks logo, LANShield, and "Control every user. Secure every port." are trademarks of ConSentry Networks Inc., for use in the United States and other countries. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective holders.
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