Schelde Marinebouw B.V. optimally protected with Proventia MX from IBM Internet Security Systems

Schelde Marinebouw B.V. is part of the Koninklijke Schelde Group, which is itself part of the Damen Shipyards Group. The company designs and builds complex ships, in particular naval vessels. The throughput time for the design, building and delivery of a ship varies from one and a half to four years.

Challenge

“We used to use various partial solutions for our security. It requires unique knowledge and administering them was taking up more and more time. Furthermore, their scalability was limited so that connecting partners to our network securely was troublesome.” That is how Robert Boudens, ICT manager at Schelde Marinebouw B.V. in Vlissingen, describes the reason for searching a new total solution to secure data, communications and systems.

• Various partial solutions

Robert Boudens: “Every ship that we develop is different. Our customers – Dutch and foreign government bodies, but also commercial shipping lines – all have their own wish lists. This means that we have to manage data, including contract arrangements, design drawings and product information, on our systems for a long time in a comprehensible and secure manner. We previously used various partial solutions for security – for example, for firewall protection, anti-spam and URL filtering. One major drawback of this was that managing these solutions and keeping it up to date was a huge task. Usually, one person knows everything about a particular product. However, it takes a great deal of time, effort and training to keep up with developments. We were of the opinion that this had to change.”
The challengesolutions.

• Scalable – in the future too

In order to cut costs and bring down production times, Schelde Marinebouw B.V. is more and more often collaborating with external design offices, and the production of ships (hulls) is increasingly often outsourced to Damen Group shipyards abroad. Another trend is that building new ships or rebuilding of existing ones being done on foreign customers’ sites is subject to the ultimate responsibility of Schelde Marinebouw.
“And therein lay a problem with our old security environment”, explains Robert Boudens. “It was, in fact, very tricky to offer partners secure access to our network infrastructure so as to share data. The limited scalability of the existing solutions did not allow this. It was for good reason that we made it an important requirement for the solution chosen that it must be scalable now and in the future.”

Solution
After an extensive selection process, it appeared that the Proventia MX from IBM Internet Security Systems offered the best solution for Schelde Marinebouw B.V. In particular, the fact that this product comprised all the protection mechanisms demanded appeals to Mister Robert Boudens. “This means Proventia MX offers powerful facilities for intrusion detection and prevention. This is very important to us because if a hacker brings the systems down, 700 people cannot continue to work. Furthermore, this intrusion prevention systems looks to the behaviour and the content of the inspected data, ensuring a more in-depth protection. But Proventia MX offers much more then intrusion prevention. It includes firewall, anti-virus, URL-filtering, VPN tunnels, spam and phishing filters and anti-spyware. It really is a total solution in which several powerful techniques are assembled in one single system”, says Robert Boudens. In order to guarantee the continuity of security, Schelde Marinebouw chose to deploy Proventia MX on two sites (Vlissingen and Vlissingen-Oost, some eight kilometers apart). This high-availability configuration means that one site can take over the security of the other when needed.

Key benefits
To Schelde Marinebouw B.V. security is a specialist field. It very rapidly became clear that the company wanted to outsource the administration and maintenance of the solution. ON2IT, with its Managed Protection Service, was chosen for this task. Robert Boudens: “Apart from the fact that we no longer have to look around for the administration, configuration and maintenance of our security environment, it generally makes a big difference to costs. We do not have to purchase any software or hardware, but rather pay a fixed amount per month for the security of our enterprise. It is also ideal that we no longer have to keep specialist security knowledge internally. An additional benefit of the collaboration with ON2IT is that this partner supplies extensive reports on the employment of Proventia MX. Every month we know exactly how many viruses and spam emails have been blocked and get a top-100 of the most frequently visited websites. This information is used to improve proactive security even more.”

Why IBM?
Schelde Marinebouw B.V. is delighted with the facilities of Proventia MX and the support from ON2IT. Robert Boudens: “We are putting this solution – among other things – on 650 workstations and 75 laptops to protect our mobile staff even when they are abroad. The fact that we choose Proventia again underlines our satisfaction with this powerful portfolio of security products.” “We can rest assured that our systems are optimally protected and, with the Managed Service, will remain so at a fixed price per month.” Robert Boudens, ICT Manager at Schelde Marinebouw B.V.

“IBM Internet Security Systems’ Proventia MX really is a total solution in which several powerful techniques are assembled in one single system.” - Robert Boudens, ICT Manager at Schelde Marinebouw B.V.