Telefónica Global Technology selects Fortinet

Fortinet’s FortiGate® carrier-grade chassis, the FortiManager™ centralised security management and FortiAnalyzer™ logging and reporting appliances, serve as the technology platforms that enable TGT to create and manage virtual secured environments within the data centre. This helps the company secure its network to enable delivery of a broader set of services to its customers, streamlining operations and significantly reducing expenditures. Fortinet’s solutions were chosen due to their high performance, scalability, virtual capabilities and ease of use.

Telefónica (Spanish Stock Exchange: TEF) is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world with a significant presence in 24 countries and more than 315.7 million customers worldwide. The company offers the best in class mobile, fixed and broadband networks, as well as an innovative portfolio of digital solutions to its customer base.

In April 2013, Telefónica inaugurated the largest data centre in Europe at the Alcalá de Henares Science and Technology Park (TecnoAlcalá). This data centre is classified as Tier IV Gold by the Uptime Institute, recognising its highest level of availability and IT efficiency. The Alcala data centre offers cloud computing and mass processing services to businesses, while also hosting internal IT infrastructures owned by Telefónica Global Technology (TGT).

As part of an operational and cost optimisation effort undertaken by TGT, the company decided to consolidate its four main data centres in Europe (Spain, UK, Germany and the Czech Republic) and the Telefónica Corporate Data Centre into the new Alcalá Data Centre. This ambitious project required the deployment of a broad security solution for the consolidated data centre. In selecting the firewall that would best suit its needs, TGT evaluated solutions from leading firewall vendors, shortlisting Fortinet and Check Point.

After a thorough and complete selection process, Telefónica decided to award the project to Fortinet in mid-2013 because of its high performance, scalability, virtualisation capabilities, ease of use and best price/performance ratio compared to the competition.

Telefónica Soluciones, a Telefónica Group company and a Fortinet Gold partner, was awarded project implementation.

A total of 18 FortiGate-5060 chassis were deployed in nine clusters at the Alcalá and the Julián Camarillo data centres in Madrid. Each chassis can include up to six blades, delivering up to 40Gbps firewall throughput, which provides maximum performance and scalability to TGT. The FortiGate Virtual Domains (VDOMs) capabilities are used for network segmentation and enable the provisioning of multiple independent virtual firewalls within the same chassis.

In addition, the deployment included two FortiManager-3000C and two FortiAnalyzer-4000B appliances. FortiManager provides central configuration and administration for both physical and virtual firewall deployments, while FortiAnalyzer collects, stores and analyses event logs and enables centralised reporting.

“We have been very proud to count Telefónica among our customers since 2011. This new project for securing Telefónica's consolidated data centre further reflects the trust placed in Fortinet’s technologies,” said Patrice Perche, senior vice president of international sales and support for Fortinet. “We see the trend for large enterprises and telecom operators to consolidate their data centres in order to optimise on resources. This consolidation drives new demands in terms of security performance and flexibility. With the FortiGate platforms, Fortinet continues to innovate and raise the bar in both areas to provide our customers with the best security options for their new generation data centres.”