Richard Humphreys |
This article first appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of The Record.
Aevitae protects a quarter of a million customers across the Netherlands and processed over six million digital claims in 2016. On top of being the Netherlands’ leading insurance provider, it also prides itself on being a technology pioneer.
Having recently moved to the Microsoft Azure hybrid cloud in a bid to bridge its existing data centres with a new cloud data centre, Aevitae realised that it needed a new firewall solution – one that would provide seamless, end-to-end data visibility across its new, hybrid environment.
Microsoft introduced Aevitae to Barracuda, who proposed using its partner Data Unit for the implementation. “We have direct experience with all the leading firewall vendors, but only Barracuda could provide a single unified platform that would show us our data both within our own data centres and behind the Azure firewall,” said Pascal Wenders, ICT team leader at Aevitae.
The three companies worked as a single partnership to design and implement a security framework that would achieve Aevitae’s goals. While most proofs-of-concept (POC) take thirty days, Aevitae needed a full three months of evaluation to ensure the new framework would work with its two on-premises data centres and its growing Azure deployment. The fact that the same solutions would work on-premises as well as in Azure simplified the management of this solution and also meant Aevitae could monitor and manage their data using a single vendor, regardless of where the transactions were occurring.
With the Barracuda NextGen Firewall F-Series, Aevitae benefits from a single management tool. It can apply one global ruleset to all of its firewalls, whether they are on-premise or in Azure. The ability to manage everything with a single ruleset also allows it to easily migrate settings from one Azure zone to another, and changes are automatically applied in every location.
Aevitae was impressed at the end of the POC: It can merely ‘throw the switch’ and turn the POC into a production environment, which greatly streamlines the deployment. It’s now easier for the company to migrate workloads to Azure, and it is looking at the Barracuda TINA tunnel as a way to create a wholly-meshed network between its data centres and Azure.
Together, the Barracuda NextGen Firewall F-Series and Web Application Firewalls running on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform have revolutionised Aevitae’s IT and has greatly improved the company’s productivity and security. IT is now a business enabler, helping spur Aevitae’s growth.