News

BTI Sita selects Fortinet for multi-site deployment

Fortinet has announced that BTI (Business Travel International) Sita, a leading travel management company in India, has selected Fortinet’s FortiGate integrated network security appliances to secure its business data. BTI Sita evaluated security solutions from a number of vendors, including Juniper, Cisco and SonicWall before deciding on Fortinet’s solutions.

“We chose Fortinet over the others because it gave us the best scalability, upgradability, bandwidth management, optimisation, content filtering and reporting facilities—all at the best price points,” says Richard Bright, Head, IT at BTI Sita.

BTI Sita, owned by the Kuoni Travel Group headquartered in New Delhi, has 13 offices in major cities across India. Earlier, the company was running a decentralised network environment, with most of its data kept in FoxPro databases. Recently, the company has begun re-architecting its network and data infrastructure, consolidating data, and rolling out new enterprise resource planning and centralised reservation system initiatives. With the move from an X.25 network with no Internet access to a TCP/IP network with connectivity to the Internet, and the deployment of new applications that relied heavily on mail servers, the company decided that it was time to develop and implement a security strategy.

BTI Sita found that, in addition to providing high-levels of security without compromising network performance, the FortiGate platforms also integrated well with their existing Active Directory network and provided security-reporting facilities with all the necessary criteria for selection.

BTI Sita has purchased several FortiGate platforms, including a FortiGate-200A system at its headquarters in Delhi to provide comprehensive security services for e-mail, ERP and FTP data traffic and servers as well as remote logging; five FortiGate-100A systems in satellite offices around the country; and two FortiGate-60 systems which are currently under test and soon to be rolled out.

BTI Sita has deployed firewall, anti-spam, anti-virus and IPS capabilities, as well as Web content filtering for their FortiGate platforms.

“With our data increasing in volume and criticality, an effective security solution is paramount to our business. We have seen a dramatic reduction in spam and intrusions since implementing the Fortinet solution,” notes Bright.

Adds Vishak Raman, Country Manager for Fortinet, “Travel companies typically have high data traffic and stringent security requirements due to the confidentiality of the information they handle such as customer credit card numbers and personal information.”