Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT) - a world leader in high-performance network security - today announced that Ariston Thermo Group, the worldwide leader in thermic comfort manufacturing, has deployed FortiGate® network security appliances to protect a network of 2,000 employees across 70 locations around the world. The manufacturer has also implemented Fortinet’s FortiMail® secure messaging solution to protect 3,500 mailboxes from spam and other malware targeting emails. Fortinet products were chosen primarily for their features, performance, and ease of management.

Ariston Thermo Group offers a full range of products, systems and services that provide heating and hot water and are designed for maximum comfort and minimum energy consumption. With 6,700 employees worldwide and total revenues of 1.25 billion euros, Ariston Thermo Group is present in over 150 countries and annually sells 6.4 million products that are manufactured in 19 production sites spread across 10 countries.

Ariston Thermo Group decided to make changes to its security infrastructure to achieve greater flexibility, performance and centralised management. For firewall protection, the company selected Fortinet’s FortiGate-620B over competing products from Cisco, Juniper and Palo Alto Networks because of its breadth of integrated security functions, virtualisation capabilities and configuration flexibility. For secure messaging, Ariston Thermo Group selected Fortinet’ FortiMail-400B because of its superior anti-spam functionality and reporting capabilities.

“The virtualisation environment provided by Fortinet allowed us to simplify the firewalling configuration. The new implementation has made the infrastructure more manageable, more flexible, more robust and reliable,” said Laura Laici, team leader of the Technological Competence Center at Ariston Thermo Group. “And FortiMail provided us with a strong anti-spam service and streamlined reporting. Fortinet’s appliance also simplifies our log search, which saves time and results in fewer calls to our help desk.”

In order to consolidate all the branch offices’ Internet accesses into one centralised access, Ariston Thermo Group has implemented a centralised Internet architecture from its global headquarters in Fabriano, Italy. At the network perimeter, the implementation of a cluster of FortiGate-620B appliances in redundant configuration provides broad network security and, thanks to virtualisation, enables the routing functionality required for the Internet access consolidation across Europe. Ariston Thermo also deployed FortiGate-111C devices, in order to benefit from the same security functions – including firewall, IPS, application control, anti-virus and Web filtering - in Vietnam and India local networks.

In a second stage, for messaging security, Ariston Thermo Group has deployed a cluster of FortiMail-400B appliances to protect against malware coming from Web and mobile traffic. The solution helps protect email traffic across Europe, Russia and Vietnam.  It processes 75,000 emails per day and allows for centralised Internet access, standardisation and increased reliability.

“Ariston Thermo is a long-standing customer of ours that has taken advantage of our broad product portfolio to standardise their network security worldwide,” said Patrice Perche, senior vice president of International Sales & Support at Fortinet. “We help many global manufacturing organisations reduce the complexity of securing their network by providing solutions that allow scalable and broad protection against network-level and content-level threats without degrading performance of critical applications or network availability.”

For more information on Fortinet’s FortiGate products, please visit: http://www.fortinet.com/products/fortigate/index.html

For more information on Fortinet’s FortiMail products, please visit: http://www.fortinet.com/products/fortimail/index.html

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