Case studies: London Borough of Lewisham

Delivering cost effective flexible working.

"Cisilion’s technical knowledge regarding Cisco VPN’s was invaluable to the successful project delivery and their Engineers were particularly effective at working as part of the team with Fujitsu to develop and install the remote/home worker solution for London Borough of Lewisham."

Nicholas Wolfe, London Borough of Lewisham.

 

The customer

The London Borough of Lewisham is an inner London borough covering an area of approximately 14 square miles of south-east London. It has has about 6000 workers including teachers. In 2003/4 the council had a budget of over £350m to provide Housing, Education, Social Services, Highway and Environmental Services in the Borough.

 

The challenge

The traffic congestion in the Catford area makes travelling difficult especially during rush hours. Lewisham was looking at more efficient methods for giving remote/home workers and councillor’s access to the councils I.T resources such as email, file-shares and core systems. Also, the council wanted to introduce hot-desking for remote/home workers and councillors to access the councils I.T resources while visiting the Town Hall.

 

The solution

It was decided that using the Internet for remote/home workers and councillors using the Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator with 3DES encryption would be the ideal replacement for users remotely accessing the councils I.T resources without compromising security. Also, the Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator would be used to encrypt hot-desking users data whilst in the Town Hall. The council installed Cisco 1200 802.11g Aironet Access-Points and a VPN 3020 Concentrator.

Two Cisco VPN 3005 Concentrators using V 4.1 were used in a loadbalancing configuration for Internet VPN access. Each VPN Concentrator supports 200 IPSec and 50 SSL remote clients.

The Cisco VPN IPSec Client also comes with a built-in personal firewall, which is centrally controlled on the VPN 3000 Concentrators. The Cisco Clientless SSL VPN uses the Microsoft Internet Browser and does not need any software installed on the remote system, making it ideal for home users using their own PC’s.

After an evaluation period of the Cisco 1200 Wireless LAN Access- Point it was decided that WEP static encryption key would not meet the strict security requirements that the council must follow. It was thought that the WPA dynamic WEP key would be too complex to use as it involved using the latest Microsoft XP Operating System SP1 on all Laptops using the Cisco 1200 Wireless LAN Access-Points. Also there are very few Wireless Cards that currently support the 802.11g 54Mbps WPA standard.

The Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator has very good support for Wireless users with its auto-imitate feature, which automatically connects users to the Wireless LAN. For the hotdesking areas at the Town Hall a Cisco VPN 3020 Concentrator was used which offered 50Mbps 3DES throughput and can support up to 750 IPSec and 200 SSL VPN users.

 

The benefits

By using the Cisco VPN Client as a single security solution for both remote/home and hot-desking users, the cost of installation and configuration was greatly reduced and ROI improved.