Case studies: London Borough of Tower Hamlets

A scalable VPN Solution to provide a secure home working solution

"Prior to this project we had never partnered with Cisilion. The professional approach to project management and technical delivery within budget and on time has resulted in us working closely with Cisilion on a number of other security based projects."

C. Short C.Eng MBCS

 

The customer

The London Borough of Tower Hamlets has over 10,000 workers including teachers. In 2003/4 the Council had a budget of over £720m to provide Housing, Education, Social Services, Highway and Environmental services in the Borough.

 

The challenge

After performing a complete upgrade of the existing LAN infrastructure the London Borough of Tower Hamlets recognized the need for a secure and scaleable remoteaccess / VPN solution that would meet all the Borough’s current and future business requirements.

This VPN solution would initially provide a secure home-working solution for the 51 Councillors throughout the Borough. The installed VPN solution had to be scaleable to allow connectivity for up to 1500 remote users and small sites.

To increase productivity amongst the London Borough of Tower Hamlets staff members, secure wireless access to the main network was required from all of the Borough’s Offices.

After upgrading the complete LAN infrastructure the London Borough of Tower Hamlets needed a flexible AAA (Authentication, Authorization and Accounting) solution implemented on their new infrastructure, consisting of approximately 225 core devices (routers and switches), that allowed for accurate user tracking as well as different accessrights based on the user’s role within the IT department.

To allow for future growth and to support the newly implemented VPN solution the existing Firewall had to be upgraded and to tie the whole solution together a network management platform was required to monitor and manage the newly implemented LAN infrastructure.

 

The solution

A Cisco VPN Concentrator was deployed as the main site VPN termination device. For the small remote sites Cisco 800 series routers were deployed while the Cisco VPN client was used for the home-workers and councillors.

The Cisco Secure ACS Server was deployed as a central authentication server used for authenticating VPN users, dial-in users and IT staff members for managing the core devices.

To provide a secure flexible wireless solution the Cisco VPN Concentrator was used to separate the secure wired network from the insecure wireless network.

The main advantage of using IPSec based VPN technology to protect the wireless network is that it is a vendor independent solution; the security is handled by the IP layer in the VPN software, so the wireless adapter doesn’t have to support advanced security mechanisms.

 

The benefits

This solution has provided London Borough of Tower Hamlets with a secure VPN infrastructure which provides room for expansion in the future and meets their current performance needs allowing remote workers to securely connect into the central network.

Cutting out many hours of unnecessary travel considerably improves the productivity of the Borough’s staff. This productivity gain results in cost savings, allowing for more efficient use of limited budgetary resources.