I had the pleasure to speak with Peter Lyndley, Senior Security Engineer at Softcat, in a recent webinar. Softcat has been an Indeni customer for many years. It was great to get Peter’s perspective on his experience with Check Point firewalls and how he has been leveraging Check Point technologies to protect Softcat and their customer environments. 

Highlights from the Webinar

1. Check Point incident response team will help you find out how your environment was compromised regardless of whether you’re a Check Point customer. They will make sure that the hole is plugged to avoid future compromises. 

2. Peter shared a real life experience when a customer’s Active Directory service suddenly disappeared from their network. Check Point incident response team immediately stepped in to investigate the problem. They identified an incorrect firewall rule was put in place inadvertently exposing the environment. 

3. Peter shared some of the day to day challenges he constantly faces with limited resources. He spoke about the need for a single console and the need to leverage automation to efficiently manage a highly complex environment. 

4. For years, Indeni has been helping Softcat manage their 200+ firewalls. Peter spoke about the proactive nature of Indeni alerts. Using the traffic light analogy, he wants to know about the amber state. Understanding the warnings prevents problems. Don’t wait for issues to turn red, that’s just too late! Having Indeni is like having eyes and ears on every firewall all the time.

5. Peter described Indeni as a community based product where he is getting knowledge from outside of Softcat. It’s like having knowledge from many industry experts.

6. Human errors are still a common mistake. This problem is worsened when there is not enough time to perform daily tasks, making mistakes inevitable. For example, if you make a configuration change in a High Availability device by mistake, Indeni will alert you immediately of any mismatches to prevent problems from occurring during switchover. 

7. Check Point Pro is proactive support and good at recommending best practices. Indeni is a real-time monitoring and network automation solution. They play different roles in your environment. The combination of both the solutions is ideal. 

Summary

These are just some of the highlights from Peter. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. Thank you Peter for sharing his invaluable insights. Watch the full webinar here. If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to send them to [email protected].