gas south cloudguard iaas azure case study.pdf

Gas South Reduces Business Risk with CloudGuard Network Security in Azure

GAS SOUTH

Industry
Energy

Customer Profile

Gas South is a leading provider
of natural gas throughout the
southeastern U.S.

Challenge

Solution

Results

"Check Point CloudGuard Network
Security has been a saving grace for
Gas South. It is the only solution that
gives us secure, stable, complete
access to our critical applications and
services in Azure.”

Overview

Gas South is a leading provider of natural gas. It serves more than 300,000
residential, business, and governmental customers in Georgia, Florida,
North and South Carolina. Gas South offers simple and competitively
priced rate plans, outstanding local customer service, and a promise to
give back 5% of its profits to help children in need. Since 2016, Gas South
has been recognized as one of the “Top Workplaces in Atlanta” by the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Business Challenge

Ensuring Cloud Access for Business Continuity

In 2016, Gas South migrated its previously outsourced IT infrastructure to
Microsoft. It chose Office 365 as its new email platform, created its own
Active Directory domain, and migrated its server infrastructure to Azure.
Soon, many business-critical applications and DevOps functions were
running in Azure. The decision to use Azure as a virtual data center gave
Gas South more agility and scalability. It also presented the IT team with a
new challenge:

The on-premises data center was still an essential link between users and
Azure-hosted applications. Users connected via an on-premises Check Point
Next Generation Firewall with IPSec VPN links. However, if the data
center became inaccessible due to a storm or disaster, or the building lost
power, no one could access business-critical applications in the cloud.
Unfortunately, power outages have been a recurring problem from fiber
cuts that happen during numerous construction projects in the vicinity.

“We’ve suffered several outages from connectivity providers’ fiber cables
being cut,” said Rajiv Thomas, Senior Systems Engineer for Gas South.
“Whenever that happened, we had zero access and no visibility into our
Azure cloud deployment. An outage disrupts customer service, sales, and
online operations.”

Even without construction activity, data center outages are common. The
Uptime Institute Ninth Annual Data Center Industry Survey 2019 found
that 34% of data centers surveyed suffered an outage or serious service
degradation in the past year—many with serious financial consequences.
Ten percent (10%) of all respondents said that their most recent significant
outage cost more than $1 million. The Uptime Survey also reports that half
of those using public clouds for mission-critical applications said they do
not have adequate visibility into their assets.

SOLUTION

Seeking the Secure Link

One option was to establish a public Internet connection to the Azure
cloud, but that would significantly increase risk and complicate regulatory
compliance. Seeking private access, Gas South chose to implement Azure
Express Route, a virtual private connection to ensure confidential access to
their data as well as enhance reliability and lower latency.

While the team had private access, they still had the traditional cloud
security risks and needed a security complement. The IT team tried a
Microsoft solution to secure and protect cloud access, but it was not
adequate for Gas South’s complex network. Next, they tried a third-party
appliance in Azure for the solution, which didn’t work either. When Thomas
learned about Check Point CloudGuard Network Security, he immediately
knew it would be the right solution.

“We quickly arranged a POC with Check Point,” said Thomas. “The setup
and configuration were so simple that we had the POC up and running in
three days. The POC confirmed our choice, and we put it into production.”

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security delivers advanced, multilayered
security for Azure environments, protecting assets in the cloud
from attack while providing secure connectivity between the enterprise
network and the company’s Azure deployment. CloudGuard Network
Security delivers fully integrated security protections, including firewall,
Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), antivirus, and anti-bot defenses against
unauthorized access and malicious network attacks. The IPSec VPN blade

"Thanks to the CloudGuard Network Security integration with Active Directory, each user has only one ID and password”

-Rajiv Thomas,
Systems Engineer, Gas South

allows secure connectivity over a dedicated and encrypted tunnel between
Azure Virtual Networks (vNETs) and the enterprise network. With built-in
remote access capabilities, users now can connect to Azure via an SSL
encrypted connection, two-factor authentication, and device pairing. The
CloudGuard ID Awareness blade helps ensure that only authorized users
can access services.

Gas South’s assets are secured in the cloud with elastic scalability and
high availability through CloudGuard Network Security native integration
with Azure. CloudGuard also simplifies security management and policy
enforcement across the enterprise data center and the Azure deployment.

Benefits

Business as Usual

“Check Point CloudGuard Network Security has been a saving grace for
Gas South,” said Thomas. “It is the only solution that gives us stable,
complete access to our critical applications and services in Azure. Our
users now can work anywhere, in spite of an outage.”

As an example, Gas South’s commodity traders conduct live trading on gas
trading websites. These sites filter traders’ IP addresses to authenticate
users. Gas South traders must be physically onsite to do their work—trying
to log into these sites remotely through an ISP appears to come from an
unauthorized IP address and users are thus denied access. In one outage,
the data center lost power and trading operations ceased. When Thomas
and his team received the call, he was able to quickly provide them with
authorized access through CloudGuard Network Security.

“Thanks to the CloudGuard Network Security integration with Active
Directory, each user has only one ID and password,” said Thomas. “We
quickly had them log into the cloud and everything worked perfectly.”

Agile, authorized access through CloudGuard Network Security has greatly
increased uptime for many groups within Gas South. In one incident, an air
conditioning system in the data center failed, causing the data center to
overheat and shut down. Immediately, users were logged into applications
through CloudGuard Network Security and there were no complaints.

“When you have a basic understanding of security, the CloudGuard solution
is so easy to deploy and use,” said Thomas. “We have a fully functional
firewall with the added value of secure remote access and secure VPNs to
vendors’ sites hosting mission-critical applications.”

“Check Point
CloudGuard
Network Security
solved a huge
business continuity
challenge for us,
which enabled
us to reduce
overall business
risk. We consider
Check Point a
trusted advisor
and look forward
to extending
our CloudGuard
deployment
with additional
capabilities and
automation”

—Rajiv Thomas,
Systems Engineer, Gas South

Seeing Clearly in the Cloud

Through Check Point R80 Unified Security Management, Thomas and
his team now have clear visibility into their assets and traffic activity in
Azure. They can view inbound connections, see traffic sources, and know
how connections and assets are being used and by whom. This visibility
increased overall security, enabling Thomas to blacklist specific IP address
ranges and malicious URLs.

An Even Better Place to Work

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security has even enhanced the
company’s reputation as a great place to work. With the ability to access
systems remotely, the company allows its customer care agents to work
from home one day a week. And when winter ice storms shut down roads,
agents can continue to serve customers without interruption.

“Our employees are most important to us,” said Thomas. “Every person
is needed for the team to deliver outstanding service. Being able to offer
a flexible work-from-home day isn’t typically within the realm of a typical
security solution, but Check Point CloudGuard Network Security isn’t
typical.”

Next Steps

The IT team is seeing steady growth in the number of employees logging
into Azure directly instead of through the on-premises connection. As
more groups deploy workloads and applications in Azure, Gas South
can increase its visibility across CloudGuard-protected assets to further
enhance the company’s security.

“Check Point CloudGuard Network Security solved a huge business
continuity challenge for us, which enabled us to reduce overall business
risk,” said Thomas. “We consider Check Point a trusted advisor and
look forward to extending our CloudGuard deployment with additional
capabilities and automation. For example, we have started to evaluate
CloudGuard Posture Management for further visibility into our network,
to improve our overall cloud security posture and for its continuous
compliance capabilities, and we are looking into CloudGuard Log.ic for
advanced security analytics.