Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 54 | Page 59

CASE STUDY IIntroduction This premier service provider in the Middle East offers a broad variety of ICT solutions and digital services to consumers and businesses. Thirty million people rely on its mobile, fixed and Wi-Fi services to stay connected to the world, and the company also offers a broad range of IT, cloud and cybersecurity solutions to businesses. Challenge With digital connections an essential part of people’s personal and work lives, 4G traffic on the provider’s mobile network was rising sharply. An innovator, the telecom company launched 5G in 2019 and plans to build the largest 5G network in the Middle East. The telecom giant needed at-scale protection to safeguard its 4G and 5G mobile networks. The company had long relied on another vendor to provide firewall and carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) services for the GiLAN segment of its mobile network. But as traffic volumes steadily climbed, the performance of the firewalls began to lag. Limited throughput and degrading connections per-second performance could expose the network to attacks or an unsatisfying subscriber experience. But staying the course meant purchasing entirely new firewalls from the vendor. That required a large upfront capital investment, and THE COMPANY CHOSE THUNDER CFW FOR ITS THROUGHPUT, SCALABILITY AND FLEXIBILITY OF THE VIRTUALISED AND PHYSICAL PLATFORMS. www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 59