Charnwood is a local government district with borough status in northern Leicestershire, England. It’s named after Charnwood Forest; the main town is Loughborough. Like many organizations, the Charnwood Borough Council (CBC) was using a number of different security technologies to protect itself against the burgeoning myriad of online threats. For example, it outsourced its firewall, VPN, email filtering and web filtering security to separate companies.
CBC discovered that not only was this method not cost-effective, it also brought with it an administrative burden that significantly impacted resources. CBC turned to Network Box because it provides UTM (unified threat management) via a managed service, meaning it secures private networks, protects against all online threats and, crucially, requires negligible administration.
Since implementing Network Box, CBC has unparalleled visibility and can see everything that is happening on the organization’s network.
"We've been able to detect a number of emails that contained inappropriate content that we don't want distributed via our network,” says CBC IT Manager Christian Turner. “For example, one employee sent an email containing lots of wedding pictures which would have been downloaded on to her PC. This type of email is then sent to friends. The images weren't explicit or inappropriate, but circulating that many images slows the system for other users. Network Box allows us to block these emails and educate users on what the email system should be used for.”
Network Box has also helped CBC reduce its bandwidth use.
"Audio and video downloads used to be a problem because of the drain on bandwidth; now Network Box allows us to simply prevent or restrict the downloading or streaming of large files, unless there is a real business case supporting the requirement,” says Turner. "Overall, we've been thoroughly impressed with Network Box and would recommend it to any organization that is wasting lots of money and time running lots of different security solutions."