Red Deer Polytechnic Academic Modernization

INDUSTRY:

Challenge

RDP’s leadership expressed concern about an increasing number of security challenges faced by their SecOps teams and sought to improve their overall security posture. The primary objective was protecting their sensitive data and critical assets within their Data Centers. To achieve this, the institution engaged OnX to deliver an infrastructure assessment and security review inclusive of recommendations for remediation. A modernized security platform and segmentation between the campus and Data Center was deemed paramount to a successful outcome.

Solution

The client tasked OnX engineers with enhancing their security architecture through the implementation of a high performance and scalable Data Center Edge firewall cluster. OnX identified an opportunity to further consolidate the Internet Edge firewalls onto the new security appliances as part of a larger lifecycle refresh.

OnX led the effort with RDP to implement a pair of Cisco Data Center-class Next Generation Firewalls (NGFW). The design leveraged new features and capabilities only supported by Cisco — specifically Split Spanned Multi-Instance clustering between Data Centers.

Results

By inserting a wall of protection between the campus and Data Center, Red Deer Polytechnic dramatically enhanced their security posture while introducing new operational tools for policy management, enforcement, network visibility, reporting, and forensic analysis. This supports the security operations team through process and workflow improvements as well as introducing new capabilities for the automation of threat detection and containment.

Integration with Cisco’s broader security eco-system — including the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and SecureX — provides RDP a defense-in-depth strategy for securing their infrastructure in alignment with the complex challenges presented by their diverse user groups. Enhancements now possible thanks to the OnX team.