Fulton County Selects CloudShield for Greater Network Control and Increased Security.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Government Agency's Deployment of Innovative Packet Processing Servers Reduces Operational Support Costs, Boosts User Productivity, and Extends the Life of Existing Network Infrastructure

CloudShield(R) Technologies, Inc., developer of Open Network Services Platforms (ONSPs) for high-speed network services, today announced that the County Government of Fulton County, Georgia has deployed the CloudShield platform to meet growing security and network resource needs. The system is installed with an integrated suite of utilities that enhance the visibility of both network hosts and traffic, allows control of Instant Messenger applications, and boosts their Access Control List traffic filtering capabilities beyond the capacity of their existing infrastructure. The implementation has resulted in increased security against outside attacks, as well as improved worker productivity.

Because of a growing volume and sophistication of virus threats, Fulton County's IT department realized they needed to identify a way to shore up their network defenses and implement a cost-avoidance strategy to stabilize their network and ensure against outages. After reviewing several solutions and strategies, the IT department was not convinced there was a single product that could provide the security and network insight they required for the County's 7,000 users.

"We operate a highly-trafficked portal which allows the community to interact with and conduct business with the County over the Internet," said Robert Taylor, CIO of Fulton County. "Virus-generated traffic was clogging up our WAN links. We needed to control the immediate situation and put in place the means to protect the County's IT resources from further attacks."

CloudShield presented its ONSP to the Fulton County team, a fully-programmable, high performance packet processing applications server that provides full packet inspection, analysis, and transformation at multi-gigabit line rates. The ONSP's RAVE application development language and IDE supports rapid packet processing applications development.

"When we first heard about CloudShield's technology, we were skeptical that it could live up to its claims," continued Taylor. "After on-site testing we were able to validate its capabilities and capacities. We realized that it could not only complement our existing systems, but do everything we were looking for."

Analogous to spreadsheet applications that provide a complete set of embedded mathematical functions and a high-level worksheet structure for building simple -- even highly complex -- business models, the CloudShield platforms provide a complete set of embedded packet handling functions and a high-level structured programming language for building simple or complex packet processing applications. The CloudShield solutions development support team worked with Fulton County IT managers to understand their issues and determined that a total of three distinct packet processing utilities, integrated into a single application, would adequately address their needs. In approximately 60 days, the integrated utility suite was running on-site at Fulton County. Additional network traffic statistics requirements were identified, and after another 30 days of development and testing CloudShield delivered an integrated suite of four utilities including the following:

--Host_ID, for logging, identifying, and profiling the host computers communicating over the network;

--IM_Control, an Instant Messenger policy management and enforcement mechanism;

--ACL_Control, a utility for scaling up Cisco(TM) IOS(TM)-formatted access control lists beyond the capacity of most installed routers and firewalls;

--Flow_ID, a NetFlow Data Export utility for un-sampled visibility into traffic statistics, applications and network flows without overtaxing the network infrastructure.

CloudShield's solution helps Fulton County monitor and report on all network traffic for greater overall network and application awareness, and it provides the network administrators the capability to control the use of non-essential Instant Messenger applications and control what applications are being downloaded to County PCs. Since deploying CloudShield's ONSP and integrated applications suite, Fulton County can now ensure that WAN bandwidth is available for handling the County's business needs by blocking the floods of Internet connections generated by infected PCs. Additionally, with fewer application downloads, the rate of virus-infected PCs has been reduced along with reduced web browser pop-ups and associated extraneous traffic. Consequently the number of calls to their desktop support staff has dropped.

"CloudShield's ID Utilities give us a complete view of our network traffic and hosts, and together with the ONSP's high rate of stateful inspection, provides us with valuable insight into the applications on our network," said Taylor. "And the Control Utilities help protect important WAN links ensuring critical servers remain available to county residents."

About CloudShield

CloudShield Technologies provides multi-gigabit programmable open platforms for network services. With CloudShield platforms, partners can rapidly develop and deploy network applications and solutions that require complete traffic visibility and deep packet inspection for high-speed, high-volume deployments. More information about CloudShield can be found at www.cloudshield.com.