U.S. Army officers needed a high-end security system to protect the wired and wireless outdoor network at the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. They required a single appliance having multiple functionalities due to the limited IT staff at Dugway. They found such a solution at Fortinet, a maker of unified threat management (UTM) solutions in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Army personnel at Dugway have deployed Fortinet’s FortiGate-5000 series, FortiWiFi-60B, and FortiAnalyzer to provide security for the outdoor network. Dugway staff worked closely with Secure Network Innovation Inc. in Sandy, Utah, a provider of multithreat security systems that enable secure communications, to deploy the Fortinet system.

U.S. Army personnel at Dugway test U.S. and allied biological and chemical defense systems, perform nuclear biological chemical survivable testing of defense material, provide support to chemical and biological weapons conventions, and operate and maintain an installation to support test missions.

The security infrastructure solution at Dugway includes the FortiGate-5050 carrier-class platform with FortiGate-5001 FA2 and FortiGate-5005 FA2 security blades in high-availability mode for firewall, VPN, antivirus, and intrusion prevention protection. The FortiGate-5000 platform helps to provide the bandwidth required to protect Dugway’s redundant terabyte backbone. Seventy-five FortiWiFi-60B appliances secure the Dugway outdoor wireless network, which spans more than 40 kilometers of desert terrain.

“The deployment of the FortiGate-5000 has allowed us to meet the stringent standards of the Federal government while also ensuring that Dugway’s network is secure from malicious threats that could affect network performance and, as a result, defense operations,” says Brent Martinez, president of Secure Network Innovation.

The deployed FortiGate system protects Dugway’s network 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Fortinet’s FortiGuard Network automatically updates the solutions to ensure protection against content-based threats from e-mail and Web traffic, including viruses, worms, intrusions, and other unwanted network traffic.

“Fortinet’s FortiGate-5000 series systems are designed to have the capacity and speed to provide protection for the core of the largest networks—including high-traffic, high-bandwidth networks like Army Dugway,” says Jeff Lake, vice president of Federal operations at Fortinet.

For additional information, visit Fortinet online at www.fortinet.com.