RWTH Aachen University

Overview

RWTH Aachen is the technical university of the Rhineland-Westphalian city of Aachen in northwest Germany. Widely recognized as one of Europe’s most distinguished technological institutions, the university serves 40,000 students across nine faculties. Recently, RWTH Aachen was selected for a second time as a University of Excellence, retaining its status as one of Germany’s elite universities.

Challenge

Like other research-oriented institutions, universities are an attractive target for cyberattacks, and, as a result, their criteria and demands for security are stringent. The Center for Computing and Communication of RWTH Aachen University had several important criteria for network security, including high performance and availability, heterogeneous infrastructure and system environments, seamless connections to several research networks, and the ability to support variable user roles, permissions, and access rights. The university needed a security solution that could manage a data load of more than 20 Gbps, while offering protection from an increasing number of targeted attacks at end-user devices.

Solution

At the end of 2013, the university chose to renew its next-generation firewall software licenses based on the solution’s return on investment and its ability to scale, which were superior to competing products.

“In our demanding environment, there are few systems on the market that are capable of meeting our criteria. After a lengthy evaluation of available solutions, we were convinced that the Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall provides both optimal protection and high availability—and with a price performance ratio suitable for a public institution.”
— Andreas Schreiber, Chief Business Development Officer, RWTH

Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall automatically distributes RWTH’s incoming and outgoing network traffic among seven interlinked firewall clusters to ensure top network performance and availability. Even under high traffic loads, every five hundredth data packet inspected by the firewall is screened out as malware. The clustering strategy has many other advantages, including the ability to keep firewall protection up and running even while IT personnel perform maintenance and optimization of the network infrastructure.

For software updates and other maintenance, individual firewalls can be temporarily disconnected from the cluster while remaining systems take over control of data traffic. Thus, the university no longer needs to impose maintenance windows that limit access to services and data. In addition, major updates to the firewalls, which are due about once per quarter, can be carried out without the need for external support.

Results

With Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall, RWTH is well equipped for the future.

“The global security situation and our requirements will undoubtedly become even more complex in the future. Thus, a network security infrastructure that is capable of keeping up with these growing requirements is absolutely crucial for us.”
— Schreiber

RWTH Aachen University has relied on Forcepoint security solutions since 2013.