OVERHAULING A NETWORK FOR A $4 BILLION ACQUISITION

When you're involved in a $4 billion acquisition, you want to be certain that I.T. infrastructures of both companies will mesh smoothly, without security breaches, service disruptions, data loss or compliance risks. So when NetScreen agreed to be acquired by Juniper Networks, NetScreen called Advoco.

Handling a web of risk safely

Prior to being acquired, NetScreen had grown rapidly via a widely distributed sales force. To keep all connections secure, each sales professional relied on a VPN and his own firewall. But lack of central access control meant that all of these dispersed firewalls-over 300 of them-presented a serious business risk during the upcoming merger.

Working with Advoco, NetScreen identified this specific VPN challenge and others, including possible interoperability issues between the two corporate networks. We then assessed the combined design of the NetScreen and Juniper networks to understand where gaps and security issues existed. Finally, we worked closely with network users-both local and remote-to achieve security for VPN endpoints, bringing all 300 firewalls under central management or, in some cases, disconnecting them altogether.

Merging networks and knowledge

During any large-scale integration of I.T. resources, solving the technical challenges is obviously critical, but true success requires knowledge transfer between merging teams. Advoco's expertise in this area played an important role in ensuring that Juniper's I.T. staff would have the knowledge they needed to fold any required NetScreen I.T. assets into their own, and go-forward with a secure, efficient merger process.

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