Securing a Growing Network

KK Fine Foods

Industry: Ready Meals Manufacturer
Network Size: 75 users

"With a large, complex operation like ours, the kind of high
level control Untangle offers is indispensable."

Background
KK Fine Foods, on the border between England and Wales, runs an intense, high volume business creating frozen gourmet meals for hotel groups, restaurant chains and other corporate or institutional customers. Managing KK’s IT environment is a complex task. The company operates round the clock during busy periods, and now has 75 PCs on its network, twice the number it had two years ago. KK has even built an “Internet Cafe” in the canteen so production line employees from abroad can stay in touch with family and friends. John Hughes, Head of IT, knew he needed new strategies to move KK Fine Foods through its recent period of rapid growth. It would no longer be practical to administer security at the desktop. Management and network policy administration needed to be centralised.

Tackling Spam
A few years ago spam was becoming a real issue, so a Barracuda 200 spam firewall was installed. ‘It was before I started working for KK,’ says John, ‘but basically email had been brought in-house and spam was proving to be a huge problem. The Barracuda 200 did the job of filtering the spam, but it wasn’t ideal. There was such a high volume coming in, and the Barracuda only had a single, catch-all quarantine. It took half an hour every day to go through and sort out the genuine mail for our users that had been wrongly quarantined.’

Installing Untangle was a ‘massive improvement’ says John. ‘First off, when it comes to managing spam, Untangle is a big step up from the Barracuda 200,’ he says. ‘Decisions about quarantining are now in the hands of each user, rather than being pushed past a single administrator.’

Stopping Malware
‘However, the main step up Untangle offers is the added security. We have our Acceptable Use Policy, but it’s relatively relaxed – we don’t want to come down hard on what our employees can and can’t do. Before we had Untangle there was a regular problem with staff visiting dangerous sites and bringing spyware and other problems on to the system. Once a machine was infected we had to reinstall the operating system and all the software from the bottom up, and occasionally security problems like that could eat a whole day getting fixed.’

KK Fine Foods now depends on Untangle to inspect all traffic going in and out of the company’s network. Untangle filters web content, blocks spyware, and catches spam and phishing emails. For added protection, the company runs both Untangle virus scanners: Virus Blocker (based on ClamAV) and Kaspersky Antivirus. Untangle is also used to enforce KK Fine Foods’ network policies. ‘With Untangle, we assign employees by Active Directory user name to different policies, giving each one the level of access he or she needs. It’s a huge time saver, definitely. Previously we’d been managing that kind of security at the desktop, using antimalware applications on each machine.’

Adding Up The Benefits
KK Fine Foods makes use of virtually the whole suite of Untangle features. It is a scalable solution that offers spam and malware protection, user account control and straightforward central management. Best of all, Untangle is a big time saver and a non-intrusive system that keeps both the KK IT team and their users happy.

‘Beefing up our gateway with Untangle has made a big difference,’ says John Hughes. ‘With a large, complex operation like ours, the kind of high level control it offers is indispensable.’