Maintaining high quality services in extreme cases

Overview

A major player in the French insurance market, Matmut has more than 3.2 million members and close to 6.8 million contracts. It offers a complete range of property and personal insurance products, as well as financial services and savings accounts to all individuals, professionals, companies and associations.

Challenge

Maintaining high quality services in extreme cases › Matmut hosts its 600 servers and their compliant copies in two data centers which are accessible by the company’s 6,000 employees. According to Cédric Chevrel, Head of Security at Matmut, the daily objective is to maintain and exceed Matmut’s standard for high quality of service. In order to do so, the Matmut IT team has built its security portfolio around a strategy based on load balancing. Therefore, it’s crucial for its two datacenter sites to communicate efficiently with each other so that critical data can be accessed at all times.

“Matmut has always been committed to providing the best quality of service to its users. Our users must not be impacted by a network incident. If an incident should occur somewhere, there must always be an alternative path to access critical information.”
— Chevrel

Solution

Forcepoint NGFW: An infallible solution since 2001 › Matmut uses Forcepoint NGFW appliances to meet its standard for high quality of service. According to Chevrel, Forcepoint NGFW’s load balancing functionality, which allows each appliance to be replicated between Matmut’s two data sites, was its key selling point.

“We chose Forcepoint in 2001. Forcepoint was the only one to offer this function of load sharing between our two data rooms, which worked very well for us. By calculating which machine responds the fastest, the pilot is able to direct packages over the water to one site or the other, all the while maintaining smooth traffic.”
— Chevrel

In this case, a pair of NGFWs share exactly the same firewall, IPS, IDS,VPN, load balancing and SD-Wan rules from one site to another.

“We asked ourselves the question of changing the solution around 2004. We evaluated several offers from the market. At the end of our tests, it was Forcepoint which proved to be the most reliable for our installation. Since then, we have never found better in terms of value for our investment.”
— Chevrel

Results

Intervention without disruption allows real-time reactivity › The ability to intervene without disrupting Matmut users or data access allows Chevrel and his team to quickly update applications or redirect network traffic.

“Too many companies end up with the constraint of performing maintenance operations at a time when it will least disturb users. Every six months, we shut down one of the two datacenters in the middle of the day, while everyone is working on it. Our goal is to test the reliability of our system in real conditions; we demand quality. In this scenario, no one should realize that an incident has been triggered. Forcepoint NGFW guarantees us the notion that when we need to shut down a web server to update it, we just have to tell the NGFW to automatically redirect network traffic to other web servers. The operation is transparent to users and our employees appreciate this exibility.”
— Chevrel

Forcepoint gives system teams the power to manage the reliability of their network › Matmut welcomed the ergonomics of the NGFW management console, which Chevrel says, enables system and application administrators to further support the network and its security.

Matmut guarantees the availability of its services, thanks to Forcepoint › Overall, Forcepoint NGFW is recognized by Chevrel as a reliable and effective solution.

“Forcepoint NGFW is a powerful and reliable tool that allows us to calmly approach the technical construction of our security strategy, even when we have high levels of requirements.”
— Chevrel