Salford City Council is usingRSA's
enVisionsecurity appliance to control access to the
Government Connect Secure Extranet (GCSX).
Joe Whiteley, ICT infrastructure specialist at Salford City
Council, said the council needed to comply with strict security
regulations to access certain applications on the GCSX, which meant
he needed to track users from the time they log into Windows up to
the point they access the central government services.
Whiteley adapted the council's network policy to implement rules
in its firewalls that limited access to the GCSX.
The council needed an effective way to monitor security
information and event management, which could record every time
staff used the GCSX to access government data, along with details
about the data being accessed and ways in which it was being
used.
He said, "RSA Envision sits at the core network infrastructure.
It works like a log of activity and monitors end-point devices.
"By centralising management and storage of log files for up to
six months, RSA enVision technology helped us meet GCSX code of
connection compliance status in a matter of days."
"We also have a greater understanding of our network performance
thanks to the automated collection and analysis of logs from all
parts of the network including firewalls, VPN connections,
Microsoft Windows Server Active Directory directory service,
webmail servers and servers hosting our virtual machine
infrastructure. That helps us to reduce the time it takes to
troubleshoot."