Overview
This case study relates to our client OILIBYA, Uganda. OiLibya is the brand name used by the affiliates owned by Libya Oil Holdings and previously known as Tamoil Africa. The Libyan state-owned company has over 3000 branches in 21 countries across Africa, including Libya, Egypt, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Gabon, Kenya, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Eritrea, Uganda, Nigeria, Mauritius, Reunion, Morocco, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Sudan and Djibouti. OiLibya is managed by the Libyan Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth fund that manages Libya’s assets in other countries.
The main objective of this project was to install a Fortigate 100D firewall in the existing network of our customer OILIBYA, Uganda to meet their corporate aims through the best use of Network Security. The installation included the firewall configuration, availing the Fortiguard services like web filtering, IPS and Email protection. Apart from these services there was VPN configuration to link the remote branches and multiple ISPs link load balancing to share the load of the network traffic.
Business Challenge
The initiation of this project had many reasons behind them as follows:
- Initially there was no firewall used in their network, which means there existed a threat to their network from spam email, malware, antivirus, malicious traffic etc.
- There were no such appliances which could perform the we b filtering i.e. Allowing/Blocking of the websites like for example YouTube and various other media streaming websites were opened for access which used to consume lot of bandwidth thereby slowing down the entire network which had an impact on their business.
- Their network had services from 2 ISPs (Roke Telecom and Africel) which had provided two different WAN links used for redundancy. But the challenge was when one link goes down the other one had to be manually fail-over which would consume some time leading to business impact.
- The branches were not connected to each other so if any resources were supposed to be shared between them it was only done through emails and using FTP clients.
Solution
Below are solutions implemented for the above business challenges:
- Fortigate 100D provides the Fortiguard services like Email protection, Antivirus, IPS and Web- Filtering which helped in blocking all the suspicious websites, unwanted and bandwidth consuming sites as well as preventing the threats, malwares coming from the outside world.
- Fortigate 100D firewall comes with dual WAN link load balancing features which can enable the two links at the same time and has the auto failover option so that if one link goes down, the other will support the network without causing any disruption and if both the links are up and running then the traffic will be shared between them to prevent overloading.
- An IPsec Site-to-Site VPNs were configured to connect the branch offices as well as Remote Access VPNs for allowing the partners to connect to the office of OiLibya, Uganda so that the resources shared between them or the communication will now be in an encrypted way.