Consumer Financing Company Reduces Troubleshooting and Time to Deployment During Data Center Security Crisis

Global consumer financing company solves data center security crisis and reduces troubleshooting of next-generation firewall/IPS problem from three weeks to three hours.

Challenge: A Next-Generation Firewall/IPS Crashes in Production

A global consumer financing company had procured and implemented a combination next-generation firewall/IPS solution for its data center environment that cost nearly $1 million and included products from three big-brand vendors. The company deployed the equipment in its disaster recovery site and monitored it for a week. During this time, it performed according to specifications. The following weekend, the company and its system integrator deployed the exact same solution in the company’s production environment. And within hours, it failed. This critical network security device would not pass traffic, and had to be removed from production.

Solution: Create Authentic High-Stress Conditions to Find Cause of the Problem

Using BreakingPoint’s library of more than 150 applications, tests were created using various-sized random payloads and blended mixes from a variety of applications including HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP to understand how the device was performing in production. These test reports showed similar failures as above. In a matter of minutes, the team could point directly to two settings on the firewall that were causing the issues, allowing the customer and the firewall vendor to configure the firewall properly for the unique network traffic conditions.

Results: Pre-Deployment Testing Avoids Post-Deployment Issues and Costs

In three hours, BreakingPoint’s testing solution was able to determine the problem this team had spent three weeks trying to uncover. The following weekend, the company was able to redeploy the firewall/IPS solution in the production environment, and it continues to perform as expected. Using BreakingPoint, this global consumer finance company was able to:

• Reduce troubleshooting from weeks to hours.
• Save time and money by quickly determining the root cause of problems by recreating authentic application traffic from millions of users.
• Reduce time to deployment with the ability to set up tests in a matter of hours using preconfigured test labs and intuitive user interfaces.
• Determine true capabilities of content-aware devices by using real application traffic and live security attacks to stress deep packet inspection (DPI) capabilities.
• Adapt to the most specific custom scenarios for selective traffic shaping, application mixes, and more, with easily customizable test components.
• Enable rapid testing for critical projects by shortening test setup from weeks to just hours with preconfigured test labs and an intuitive user interface.
• Ensure accuracy of tests by using an always-current blend of real-world traffic and security attacks.

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