Customer Success Story

Automating Multitenant Security Using Virtual Firewalls

Secure-24 tailors its hosting services to individual customer requirements. With virtual firewalls, it found it could deploy and change services faster while also reducing risk.

Based in Michigan, Secure-24 serves multitenant customers with managed cloud, application hosting, and other mission-critical services. Network automation and security virtualization have simplified its operations across multiple data centers in two states and are critical to its business continuity and disaster recovery services.

Company	Secure-24
Industry	SaaS Services
Products used	vSRX, SRX Series, EX Series, Security Director
Region	Americas

Customer Success At-a-glance

Cloud-based enterprise applications to customers in highly regulated industries with security

Risk and improve performance of managed cloud hosting services

Used automation to deploy new customers in hours, not days

Challenge

Businesses need exacting performance, reliability, and security for their core enterprise applications, as any delay can interrupt the flow of their manufacturing, finance, human resources, or supply chain operations. Secure-24, based in Michigan, is known for its expertise and white-glove service for hosting of enterprise IT systems and applications.

“We deliver mission-critical applications in highly compliant environments,” says Nick Ilitch, VP Product at Secure-24. “One of our biggest challenges is reducing risk while improving the speed at which we can deliver change.”

With performance, reliability, and security top requirements for its customers across industries, Secure-24 is constantly innovating to deliver managed cloud services and hosted applications that are tailored to businesses’ individual requirements. At the same time, it wanted to accelerate its service scalability and deliver managed services more efficiently than ever before.

Solution

Delivering managed services for businesses with stringent security and compliance requirements traditionally requires physical firewalls that are dedicated to each customer. This approach, while time-honored, is both capital- and labor-intensive. Secure-24 knew that using virtual firewalls could change the game, but it needed a virtual firewall solution that would deliver the same levels of performance and protection as a physical firewall.

“We evaluated the entire market, and the decision was based on performance, reliability, and flexibility,” says Sean Donaldson, CTO at Secure-24. “With a lot of the other virtual firewall vendors, you have to sacrifice performance. Juniper vSRX truly had the performance to meet our clients’ needs.” Customers are seeking more cloud-based services and hosted applications and require the highest levels of security protection.

The high-performance Juniper Networks vSRX Virtual Firewall is ideal for securing virtualized and cloud environments. The vSRX offers the same features that are available on physical Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateways, including core firewall, networking, advanced security, and automated life-cycle management.

Secure-24 also uses AppSecure, a next-generation security suite for the SRX Series. AppSecure provides security threat visibility, enforcement, control, and protection over the network so that Secure-24 can stop application-borne security threats that would otherwise be very difficult to detect and stop.

Outcome

Using Juniper security has allowed Secure-24 to build a better network to deliver enterprise applications from the cloud faster and with the flexible security that its customers need. With Juniper, Secure-24 can highly customize security for each customer, so they can meet their compliance requirements—even as their business needs change.

“Providing customers with their own firewalls allows more thorough audits for the customer,” says Donaldson. “When the security infrastructure is 100% dedicated to one customer, it’s easy to audit and give them transparency. But when you use a multitenant device, it’s more challenging from a security stance. We’re delivering greater consistency and can truly define security for one tenant’s needs.”

That level of flexibility is essential to stay agile. “We’ve seen many of our customers come to Secure-24 while doing their own mergers and acquisitions,” says Ilitch. “If a company carves out from a larger company and needs a complete IT environment, we can give them dedicated, virtualized security to meet their demanding security requirements and give them transparency into that security. It gives them peace of mind that their ERP applications are proactively monitored.”

Using automation is critical not only to deliver security and other services consistently, but also efficiently as Secure24’s business grows. “Automation allows us to deploy a new customer environment in hours instead of weeks,” says Ilitch. “Automation eliminates complexity and decreases the time to deploy and support.”