Fulton County, Ga., Upgrades Network Security

Because of a growing volume and sophistication of virus threats, Fulton County's IT department realized they needed to identify a way to shore up their network defenses and implement a cost-avoidance strategy to stabilize their network.

"We operate a highly-trafficked portal which allows the community to interact with and conduct business with the county over the Internet," said Robert Taylor, CIO of Fulton County. "Virus-generated traffic was clogging up our WAN links. We needed to control the immediate situation and put in place the means to protect the county's IT resources from further attacks."

To meet these needs, Fulton County implemented CloudShield's open network platform, which handles the counties 7,000 users.

The solution helps Fulton County monitor and report on all network traffic for greater overall network and application awareness, and it provides the network administrators the capability to control the use of non-essential instant messenger applications and control what applications are being downloaded to county PCs.

Fulton County can now ensure that WAN bandwidth is available for handling the county's business needs by blocking the floods of Internet connections generated by infected PCs. Additionally, with fewer application downloads, the rate of virus-infected PCs has been reduced along with reduced web browser pop-ups and associated extraneous traffic. Consequently the number of calls to their desktop support staff has dropped.