International conservation charity migrates to the Cloud

The world’s largest nature conservation partnership, BirdLife International, is rationalising and improving its globalised security strategy to future proof against cyber threats and reduce management costs.

  • Monday, 11th November 2013 Posted 11 years ago in by Phil Alsop

The move unifies and outsources the management of the charity’s firewall globally to the cloud, protecting 7,400 international staff and 13 million members.


Specialist solutions provider, Icomm Technologies, is distributing pre-configured Sonicwall firewall appliances to offices as far afield as Jordan, Nairobi, Tokyo and Fiji, before managing local deployment at each office.


A fully managed service sees the appliances connect with BirdLife’s firewall hosted by Icomm in the cloud, enabling centralised management of application use, web-filtering and bandwidth to improve web service delivery to end users world-wide.


This cloud based firewall approach delivers shared protection by aggregating 'threat' intelligence and updates across all Icomm customers, so any attacks on customer networks are logged and updated automatically.


Tony Leggatt, Head of IT Systems BirdLife International, said: “We had disparate support on a collection of firewalls across the world that we recognised were inadequate against modern day threats. Our new hosted and centrally managed approach will dynamically protect us against security threats, whilst helping us drive down capex and operational costs. It will help us improve service delivery to our users by releasing the IT team to focus on more strategic tasks.”


Icomm Technologies’ Ian Callens, said: “The time and costs associated with managing network security are escalating and so is demand from end users. This level of security agility can only be delivered from the Cloud and progressive and often globalised organisations like BirdLife International are reaching for it.”