Fortinet announced that Belgacom has selected Fortinet's consolidated network security solutions as the cornerstone of its "Integrated Security Services," part of "Belgacom Explore." Fortinet's FortiGate-5000 carrier-class systems along with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer, two sophisticated management, logging and reporting tools, as well as Fortinet's FortiGuard Subscription Services will fuel Belgacom's launched managed security service.

With "Belgacom Explore," Belgacom provides its business customers, from SMBs to large enterprises and public institutions, with a complete range of information communication technology (ICT) services through one single, converged infrastructure based on IP and Ethernet. Facing the increasing number and sophistication of Internet threats, Belgacom decided it was critical to provide its "Belgacom Explore" customers with a full range of security services -- including not only firewall and virtual private network (VPN), but also antivirus, intrusion prevention (IPS), Web filtering and anti-spam.

Belgacom therefore looked at replacing its managed firewall service, based on Juniper's technology, with a complete packaged security service that would be able to address the needs of their entire "Explore" customer base by providing integrated security, flexibility and superior provisioning to thousands of users. With its unique virtualization capabilities, Fortinet was quickly identified as the security vendor that could meet all those requirements.

"Security virtualization rapidly became the answer to our needs and only Fortinet could offer to virtualize all the essential security functions on a single platform that would scale to thousands of users," said Hendrik Van De Velde, Vice President, Product and Solution Management at Belgacom. "On top of the strong performance and flexibility of Fortinet's appliances, we were impressed with Fortinet's management and reporting tools, which will allow us to provide a unique Web interface to our customers so that they have easy control and visibility over their security service."

Belgacom purchased two FortiGate-5140 carrier-class security systems to offer its customers a complete suite of security functions and multi-gigabit performance -- up to 70 Gbps firewall throughput -- with modules that can be clustered to provide any desired level of redundancy. Each FortiGate-5140 chassis-based system can provide up to 3,500 virtual domains (VDOMs), allowing Belgacom to manage thousands of customers from one hardware platform and isolate the security services offered to each customer.

Belgacom selected Fortinet's FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer to monitor the two FortiGate chassis and associated VDOMs. Through those appliances, Belgacom will be able to provide its customers with a Web interface that will help allow users to access detailed reports on network usage and attempted attacks as well as configure security parameters based on user policies and profiles.

Belgacom also purchased Fortinet's FortiGuard subscription services for antivirus, IPS, Web filtering and anti-spam, which will provide its customers with real-time automatic security updates and help assure them of the highest level of protection around the clock.

"We are seeing an increasing demand from the telco industry for supplying their customers with true value added services," said Andre Stewart, Fortinet's vice president of EMEA. "Belgacom is very proactive and diligent towards their corporate customer base and, after an in-depth analysis on their side, it became clear that Fortinet's virtualization capabilities and carrier-grade security go beyond other security solutions and will allow them to benefit from a more profitable business model."

Fortinet's FortiGate-5000 Series of modular, chassis-based multi-threat security systems are the industry's first security solutions to comply with the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) standard for next-generation carrier-grade communications equipment.