Enhancing Security and Performance at FEUP with Check Point Technology
Technology Category
- Cybersecurity & Privacy - Network Security
- Networks & Connectivity - Gateways
Applicable Industries
- Education
- National Security & Defense
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Tamper Detection
- Traffic Monitoring
Services
- System Integration
- Testing & Certification
About The Customer
The Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) is a Portuguese engineering teaching institution, part of the University of Porto. It offers undergraduate and postgraduate courses in various engineering disciplines. FEUP is committed to providing its students with the highest standards of education, focusing on advanced methodologies with access to the latest technologies. It complies with the strict quality standards required by the Declaration of Bologna, comparing favorably with the best universities in Europe. Since 2005, FEUP had been exploring technology options to increase its Internet access bandwidth, while maintaining or even increasing security. The engineering school requires a lot of bandwidth and needs a solution that supports quick, secure data transfer, a key prerequisite for researchers who have international projects.
The Challenge
The Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP) was facing a significant challenge in increasing its internet access bandwidth, which was rated at 1Gbps, while maintaining or even enhancing security. The engineering school required a solution that could support quick, secure data transfer, a crucial requirement for researchers involved in international projects. The existing problem was that high security levels led to a drastic reduction in speed. Therefore, a solution was needed that could satisfy the users' need for speed while maintaining an adequate level of protection. The solution had to accelerate data packet transfer and simultaneously handle cyber attacks and other security issues. This required an increase in packet analysis and processing capacity to maintain the necessary performance and security levels. The most significant challenge was finding a solution that could control new dynamic protocols as they emerged on the market, ensuring business continuity without interruption, and maintaining security while being transparent to users.
The Solution
Check Point deployed several solutions for FEUP. The first was ClusterXL, which distributes traffic between clusters of redundant gateways, combining the computing capacity of multiple machines to accelerate total throughput. If a gateway becomes unreachable, all connections are redirected without interruption to a designated backup. Next, SecureXL was deployed, which accelerates the performance of firewall and VPN gateways by offloading simple, but computationally intensive functions, to third-party packet processors. However, these solutions did not solve all of FEUP’s bandwidth problems due to applications that use specific protocols, which require constant analysis, thus creating administrative overhead and significantly slowing throughput. To alleviate this problem, Check Point introduced a new technology called CoreXL. This technology is integrated with VPN-1 Power and is employed on Intel multi-core processors for speeding up network security scanning. CoreXL levels out data traffic across cores, dispersing high-KB packets to other cores on the system, significantly increasing the processing power for examining packets by distributing the load across several processors.
Operational Impact
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