Safeguarding Sensitive Law Enforcement Data: A Case Study

A national law enforcement agency in the APAC region needed to construct a new data center that potentially required a very complex network infrastructure design based on the agency’s security needs.

The network design was complex because the organization’s security policy required separate sub-segments for each of its five departments, so a cyberattack on one department’s data would not compromise the data of another department. This complexity would have made it difficult for the agency’s IT team to manage and update the various
sub-segments with its current resources.

The agency managed confidential data from an array of other law enforcement organizations, including narcotics, immigration and criminal justice. The agency was also concerned about the security and availability of its website and applications, including its database, from downloads and video streaming.

The Solution

To meet the customer’s requirement of separate sub-segments and avoid the cost of building a segmented network infrastructure, Radware proposed segregation of each department’s applications by virtualizing its application delivery controller (ADC) and web application firewall (WAF) functions.

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Each department would have its own virtual ADC reserved with its own dedicated resources, including its own network interfaces, CPU and network capacity, and SSL encryption. Each virtual ADC would also get its own WAF instance with separated WAF resources (e.g., CPU power, memory, etc.) to ensure predictable performance of the WAF and ADC functions. By allocating a dedicated WAF instance per department, each department would receive its own security policy for the set of applications it protects — a key consideration when managing complex security policies for multiple applications.

The agency implemented Radware’s ADC, Alteon, and its WAF, AppWall. To manage the life cycles of ADC and WAF services per department, Radware proposed two management and monitoring solutions, APSolute Vision and Operator Toolbox (OTB), to provide SLA monitoring of applications and automation of the launching and maintenance of the ADC services.

Benefits

• A virtualized solution that increased flexibility and lowered the TCO of the new data center by avoiding the implementation of a complex physical network infrastructure
• Ability to scale delivery services without the need to add licenses or swap hardware
• Virtual segregation between departments so sensitive law enforcement data is not breached if one department is cyberattacked
• An integrated WAF that provides bot management capabilities and device fingerprinting to block Dynamic IP attacks, protecting Layers 3–7
• No added latency or single points of failure
• Support of dynamic, real-life requirements with varying application capacity prerequisites