Next Generation Firewall

Tender description

This Request for Tender (RFT) invites suitably qualified organisations to provide these services specifically for the Cork Institute of Technology’s [CIT] and the Institute of Technology, Tralee [ITT]. CIT currently has a wide area network supporting 3000+ computers. Two Cisco ASA5550 firewalls are used in active/passive mode. The College is connected to the HEAnet Network by two, recently upgraded, 10Gb/s circuits. During term-time, peak traffic is 750Mb/s, which is the ceiling of the throughput of the current appliances. We have seen recently our application performances suffer, our VLE is a hosted solution from Blackboard, and most recently, an Office 365 trial with IT Services has been inconclusive due to our bandwidth needs significantly exceed what our current firewall can manage. A rollout of Office 365 to all of the college’s staff and students would be impossible with our current solution. The recent upgrade by HEAnet from our 2 x 1Gb/s links to 2 x 10Gb/s links means we have the bandwidth available, we just need to be able to push data into these circuits at higher rates. The primary goal of this tender is to put in place a replacement product for the current firewalls that will enable CIT/ITT to provide secure firewall services for a modern educational institution. In addition to traditional stateful inspection at the port and protocol level, we are seeking a next-generation firewall (NGFW) that is able to identify the application irrespective of port number and block sophisticated attacks by enforcing security policies at the application level. The solution must combine the capabilities of traditional firewalls -- including packet filtering, network address translation (NAT), and virtual private networks (VPNs) with additional features such as intrusion prevention, SSL and SSH inspection, deep-packet inspection and reputation-based malware detection as well as application awareness.