Camelot cuts security cost with firewall consolication

National Lottery provider Camelot Group has cut its network security costs by up to 25% by consolidating its firewalls onto a single rack ­system.

Camelot, which manages the Lotto network and sells lottery products through more than 26,000 retail terminals, has found it increasingly costly to manage its firewall systems since expanding its sales channels to the internet, mobile devices and digital TV.

The resulting amount and variety of data flowing into Camelot requires a huge processing resource. To tackle this, Camelot is upgrading its networks to run at above 1gbps and is enhancing security.

"The diversity of our networks and our drive for the very best firewall protection was creating a heavy technical and management load," said Euan Webster, network systems architect at Camelot.

"Once the upgrade began, we were looking at a significant increase in the number of network interfaces required, and a corresponding increase in the number of appliances connected to them."

This would quickly lead to increased complexity, a greater maintenance and management load on staff and an unacceptable decline in network manageability, quite apart from the cost of the additional appliances, Webster said.

Working with consultants from Nebulas Security, Camelot chose to use Crossbeam X-Series security switches to host Checkpoint firewalls for all channels. In a blade server chassis, the system houses four network processing modules and four application processing modules.

"Consolidation onto the Crossbeam system reduced the complexity and management load significantly," Webster said.

"The reduction in network security costs has proved to be about 20% to 25%. This is due to the reduced number of security appliances and interface modules that would have been required for an upgrade of the existing system, and the reduction in ongoing management of the systems due to the consolidation."