Customer

The said Software Company has 14 offices across the world and all are connected by high-speed data links. The company offers software services to many multinational companies. Many of their employees are on travel around the globe any time. Even while the employees are on travel, the company wants their employees to be able to use the organization’s e-mail, web and ERP services.

Challenge

The company wanted their roaming employees to access Intranet services securely via the Internet connection at their US office. The requirements were:

	Cost effective dial-in to a local Internet Service Provider for Internet access. Users should not make long distance calls to get connected.
	Separate user id and password based Authentication for dial-in users and keeping track of their usage.
	User based Intranet access from Internet with Authentication and Logging.
	Should make use of the existing Intranet LDAP system for user verification and authentication.
	Connection (over Internet) between the dial-in user LAPTOP and the company’s site should be secured (encrypted).

Solution

After studying the network topology at the company’s US office and their business critical services we have suggested and implemented the following secure VPN solution:

	Deployed a Checkpoint firewall between Internet and internal LAN at the company’s US office.
	Integrated the firewall with their Enterprise LDAP system.
	Evaluated various software and selected IPass’ as the service provider and decided to use its dial-up client software.
	Installed the dial-up client software 'IPass' in every mobile user laptop, through which they can select the nearest location service provider point of presence while dialing.
	Setup a Unix Account Server (UAS) with all the mobile users ids and passwords. Once the remote user dials-in, service provider will authenticate the user from this UAS. On successful authentication user gets Internet access via the service provider. Once the session is closed, service provider updates the UAS about the user service usage.
	A VPN client has been installed in all the mobile user laptops. Through which they can establish a secure VPN tunnel to the firewall at the company’s US office via the Internet with a LDAP user authentication.
	On Successful authentication they can access all the Intranet services.
	Defined policy based rules and enabled logging on the firewall.

Benefits