Mazista Tiles, one of South Africa’s largest producers of slate tiles for roofing, flooring, wall cladding and other applications, has turned to a Cyberoam solution to boost security in its computer systems by controlling harmful Internet surfing and unsuitable mail and file transfers throughout the organisation.

Supplied, installed and commissioned by Cape Town integration specialists, Strategic IT Solutions, a range of Cyberoam UTM modules was seamlessly blended into the Mazista corporate network infrastructure to resolve on-line security problems.

Working with Channel Data, the South African Cyberoam distributor, Strategic IT Solutions successfully met the brief to provide transparent content security to the Mazista head office and all branch offices.

“Importantly, Mazista also subscribed to the content filtering, anti-virus and anti-spam features of Cyberoam UTM, encouraged by the performance of the product in tests,” says Strategic IT Solutions’ MD Ian Verhulp.

“Cyberoam was selected because it meets Mazista’s needs control unproductive on-line activities by staff and block access to undesirable sites as well as spyware- and malware-infested sites,” he says.

“Significantly, it also met requirements for a single box solution that will not only protect Mazista, but also future-proof the company’s security and productivity at the same time enhancing return-on-investment in the long term.”

Key features of the package, according to Mazista MD Michael Tully, are its ability to perform on-line behavioural audits for all staff members - highlighting excessive time spent at sites such as Web-mail, HTTPS, news, online shopping and gaming.

“Such sites are unproductive and access to them needs to be restricted and, if allowed, the access ought to be time bound,” he says.

“We also chose Cyberoam UTM because we needed to block ‘phishing’ and ‘pharming’ sites which trick users into revealing confidential data. And we required an anti-spam solution to keep mails secure and in-boxes clean.”

John Plaskett, general manager of Channel Data (Cape Town) describes Cyberoam UTM as a ‘deploy-and-forget’ anti-spam solution. “Many such solutions need to be trained to identify spam mails. By the time the solutions are trained, the spam pattern changes. This greatly reduces the effectiveness of the spam solutions. Spam filtering should be totally automated.”

He adds that the UTM’s anti-virus element is a perimeter level solution that, in addition to protecting the network, is able to scan and clean any malware or spyware over Web mail and scan all Web traffic to ensure content sanctity.

The Cyberoam UTM solution has been welcomed because its comprehensive reporting features monitor a number of criteria including Internet bandwidth usage, ‘most accessed’ Internet sites and results from Google searches.

“They have contributed significantly to our understanding of users’ on-line behaviour, while the Traffic Discovery module has identified the amount of bandwidth used by various applications,” adds Tully.

“This data has helped our network administrator to separate bandwidth-grabbing applications from business critical applications while boosting connectivity and productivity. It has also saved significantly on costs associated with unnecessary bandwidth wastage. It has been a prudent security investment.”