More Bandwidth for Haldiram's

Grace Technologies deployed Cyberoam in Haldiram's, has ensured 100% uptime and complete link redundancy

The Haldiram's brand goes way back to 1937 when it was just a sweets and namkeen shop in the city of Bikaner in Rajasthan, India. Haldiram Foods International, was officially founded in 1970 with its factory set up in Nagpur, Maharashtra. This was followed by a chain of retail outlets and showrooms selling their famous sweets and namkeens.

Recipient of the International Food Award, Haldiram's today is one of the leading global players in the snack food industry and ready-to-eat snacks, savouries and sweets. Its products are exported to major countries of the world, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Sri Lanka, USA, Malaysia, Poland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Qatar, Mauritius, South Korea, South Africa, UK, Saudi Arabia and UAE.

Boasting of a largest food chain, Haldiram's recently faced bandwidth congestion issues because the available bandwidth wasn't being used optimally. Unproductive web surfing by employees, and constant download of music, videos and other intensive content dominated most of the available bandwidth, leaving little room for actual work. Also, much of their bandwidth was choked because of unsolicited spam.

The Haldiram's Challenge

According to Vinod Deshmukh, head, IT, Haldiram's, Nagpur, "As in most organizations, we use Internet for communications, business-related activities and general surfing." Internet being one of the most important business enablers, Deshmukh wanted to ensure uninterrupted and safe Internet connectivity in the organization. He found Unruly Bandwidth Utilization as the main network security issue in the Haldiram's network:

As per the problem, Haldiram's employed two (2) links for internet connectivity. But, the links were not optimally managed to harness their combined bandwidth and fail over facilities. Hence, even though they had 2 links, it was as good as having a single one. This was because they suffered from bandwidth congestion and downtime upon link failure, issues typical to depending upon a single link. Lack of restrictions on the Internet usage patterns of employees led to uncontrolled access to bandwidth-hungry websites and applications. Employee-productivity was adversely affected due to non-work related surfing. Furthermore, reckless surfing added a layer of threat through malicious sites which encourage phishing and pharming. For Deshmukh a web filtering solution become very critical that could bring

the reins of all the internet usage in the network

into his hands.

The ‘Cyberoam' Solution

After scrutinizing various internet security products, including SonicWall and NETASQ, Haldiram decided that Cyberoam was the best among them all. Grace Technologies, a trusted Cyberoam partner, has been instrumental in guiding Deshmukh in this decision. Grace Technologies is a leading IT consultant engaged in providing campus-wide structured cabling, indoor and outdoor wireless, managed/unmanaged switching, WAN using leased line routers and VPN, VoIP, network security, servers and related OS and application software.

The Multi-Link manager distributes the traffic between the two links, hence encouraging use of the combined bandwidth of both links. In case of a link failure, the Automatic Link Failover feature automatically switches the traffic to the working link, without manual intervention. So the organization gets a transparent multilink management with no human interference and 100% internet uptime.

"Being associated with Cyberoam has been extremely smooth and rewarding. The support extended by the team at Cyberoam has been unfat omable, resulting in closure of major deals with var ous brands, like the recent deployment at Haldiram's Nagpur premises," said Atul Prabhakar Deogade, owner of Grace Technologies,

With Grace Technologies' help, Haldiram's bought Four (4) Cyberoam Appliances. One (1) CR50ia is deployed at their Head Office in Nagpur, Two (2) CR 25ia are deployed at other plant locations and One (1) CR 25ia is deployed at their director's residence. All are deployed in Gateway Mode.

Benefits

After Cyberoam deployment, the company saw significant benefits like Business Continuity Upheld. The Cyberoam appliance deployed at the head office was used to facilitate IPSec VPN connectivity with the Cyberoam appliances at other locations. On the other hand, Cyberoam's SSL VPN facilitates secure connectivity to the local network to roaming users from any location, anytime. These features enable safe and secure access to the internal SAP servers, which is instrumental for business continuity. Also, Haldiram's Head Office is connected with the other sites via MPLS and VPN links. The MPLS link forms the primary connection while Two (2) VPN links act as backup. Cyberoam facilitates failover of the MPLS link to a VPN link. Hence, if the MPLS link fails, all traffic is redirected via the active VPN link. Furthermore, to add a second layer of protection, 2 VPN links are maintained. On failover from the MPLS link, if even the first VPN link fails, a second VPN link lies ready to take up the task of interconnectivity.

Network Periphery Secured

Cyberoam's ICSA and Checkmark - dual certified stateful inspection firewall now fortifies the Haldiram's network and guards its servers against any unauthorized access. Also, employees are able to access internet resources, while hackers on the Internet are kept at bay. It detects intruders, blocks them from entering the company's computer network, records information, and notifies the system administrator about the source of the attempted break-in.

Web Surfing Fully Monitored

and Controlled

Cyberoam's 89+ categories tough Web and Application Filtering technology makes it easy for Haldiram to rein in uncontrolled surfing and downloading over the internet by the employees. Cyberoam blocks inappropriate and unsafe Web content, including phishing and other malware-laden sites. This is done through a constantly updated database of millions of websites. Moreover, Cyberoam's identity-based filtering allows Haldiram's to set individual user Internet access policy, surfing quota, time limits and bandwidth restrictions. "We are very happy with Cyberoam as it fulfills all our requirements and provides complete internet security to our organization," concluded Deshmukh.