Fortinet® — the pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions — today announced that Amadeus Hospitality has implemented Fortinet’s FortiGate® multi-threat security appliances to help provide broad security at the main German office and secure connections with its branch offices as well as more than 150 hotels to date across the world. Amadeus Hospitality is the hotel IT business unit of Amadeus, a worldwide leading technology partner for the travel and tourism industry.
Amadeus Hospitality provides the international hotel and catering industry with applications for profitable hotel management, worldwide distribution and IT hosting. Due to the multitude of personal data held in the hotels’ IT systems — ranging from guest addresses and staff payrolls to customer credit card details — it is crucial for Amadeus Hospitality to ensure the highest level of security internally as well as to its customers. Due to increasing virus attacks, the IT department at Amadeus Hospitality proactively started to look to replace its firewall with a more robust security solution that would offer the performance and features required to effectively protect against increasingly sophisticated Internet threats. As most hotels do not have IT staff on-site and rely directly on Amadeus Hospitality’s IT support, it was also critical to select a solution that would be easy to install and manage.
After running a comparative test with appliances from Juniper, SonicWall and Fortinet, Amadeus Hospitality chose to deploy multiple FortiGate multi-threat security appliances on its internal network, branch offices and hotels. At their main German office in Vaterstetten, a cluster of FortiGate-1000 appliances provide all the critical security functions — firewall, antivirus, anti-spam, Web content filtering and IPS — needed to protect the core network. Two FortiGate-400 appliances, also clustered for high-availability purposes, serve as VPN hubs to the hotels and remote offices. Finally, FortiGate-50 and FortiGate-60 security appliances are installed at each of those remote sites, to enable VPN connection with Amadeus Hospitality and provide broad-based security.
“Fortinet provides us with a secure environment in a simplified management scheme and very low maintenance,” said Marcus Schmid, director of IT projects and services at Amadeus Hospitality. “The performance of Fortinet’s firewall is second to none. All the required security functions are truly integrated, and the ease of configuration of the FortiGate appliances allowed us to carry out the initial deployment within two weeks in spite of a relatively large and widespread installed base.”
“Today, implementing new VPN tunnels with hotels is a matter of an hour or less. Our goal is to replace the existing ISDN connections from several thousand hotel customers with VPN connections,” adds Schmid.
Amadeus Hospitality is also using FortiAnalyzer™, Fortinet’s real-time network logging, analyzing and reporting tool. This system logs and analyzes data from all the Fortinet appliances, allowing the IT team to create tailored reports for internal purposes and to report connectivity and performance levels back to the hotels.
Amadeus Hospitality also relies on the FortiGuard® subscription services, which enables them to provide their hotel customers with real-time automatic security updates no matter where they are in the world. This allows the hotels to be assured of the highest level of protection around the clock.
“Our extensive suite of FortiGate appliances is tailored to the security needs of global businesses, such as Amadeus Hospitality, which have to ensure robust security throughout their main German office, branch offices and retail offices,” said Andre Stewart, vice president of Fortinet EMEA. “All of our appliances are based on the same robust operating system and provide a consistent high level of security functionality. This greatly simplifies installation and maintenance for our customers’ IT staff and allows us to deliver comprehensive, enterprise-class protection down to the smallest sites in their organizations.”
About Amadeus Hospitality (www.amadeus.com/hotels)
Amadeus Hospitality is the hotel IT business unit of Amadeus, a worldwide leading technology partner for the entire travel and tourism industry. The Hospitality Group provides thousands of international hotel and catering industry customers with applications for profitable hotel management, worldwide distribution and IT hosting including technical support, project management and trainings. The company offers solutions for individual hotels, hotel chains and corporations covering nearly the complete industry’s software demand: Property Management (PMS), Revenue Management (RMS/Yield), electronic and online distribution systems including hosting via Amadeus data centre, Point of Sale (POS), Back Office (stock and inventory control), Spa & Sport Management and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The Amadeus Hospitality group services hoteliers in more than 75 countries.
About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com)
Fortinet is the pioneer and leading provider of ASIC-accelerated unified threat management, or UTM, security systems, which are used by enterprises and service providers to increase their security while reducing total operating costs. Fortinet solutions were built from the ground up to integrate multiple levels of security protection — including firewall, antivirus, intrusion prevention, VPN, spyware prevention and anti-spam — designed to help customers protect against network and content level threats. Leveraging a custom ASIC and unified interface, Fortinet solutions offer advanced security functionality that scales from remote office to chassis-based solutions with integrated management and reporting. Fortinet solutions have won multiple awards around the world and are the only security products that are certified in seven programs by ICSA Labs (Firewall, Antivirus, IPSec, SSL, Network IPS, Anti-Spyware, and Anti-Spam). Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California.
Fortinet is a registered trademark of Fortinet, Inc. Fortinet, FortiGate, FortiOS, FortiAnalyzer, FortiASIC, FortiCare, FortiManager, FortiWiFi, FortiGuard, FortiClient, and FortiReporter are trademarks of the Fortinet, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks referred to herein are the property of their respective owners.