Hillstone Networks bolsters DR preparedness for Bank of China Macau

Hillstone Networks is helping Bank of China Macau improve disaster prevention and disaster response initiatives, with the goal of achieving 24/7/365 availability without compromising security or performance.

Hillstone Networks provides enterprise and security risk management solutions. Hillstone's solutions cover the enterprise from edge to cloud while improving total-cost-of-ownership.

Bank of China Macau needed a way to mitigate natural disasters that may disrupt its business, and to ensure it was financially and regulatorily compliant.

The company needed to build a disaster recovery site in Macau with an active-active configuration that would fail over in the event of a disaster.

"Finding a reliable firewall that met the criteria of an Active-Active solution was a challenge," explains Bank of China Macau's head of network admin, Kuan Leong Lai.

"Generally, a stateful firewall needs to analyse the state of all session information in order to apply security policies effectively. If a session attempts to cross over from disparate firewalls, the session will mostly likely be dropped, terminating the transaction. This is a typical scenario in asymmetric traffic environments, Active-Passive configurations and something we could not risk for many reasons."

Hillstone's Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) offer a Twin-Mode feature, which links redundant firewall pairs across multiple data centers to maintain full security for all traffic flow while ensuring failover without disruption in the event of a disaster.

Bank of China Macau selected the Hillstone E-Series NGFWs with Twin-Mode feature to fully address their requirements.

The Hillstone solution solves the asymmetric traffic flow issue by synchronising pairs of redundant firewalls in each site via dedicated data control links, essentially creating a single logical firewall.

"A highly available data center design is critical for businesses that rely on 24/7/365 system availability. Hillstone's solution is designed to do just that: help businesses achieve 24/7/365 availability without sacrificing on other requirements," says Hillstone Networks CTO and cofounder Tim Liu.

"The Hillstone Twin-Mode feature was the complete solution we sought to achieve an Active-Active environment between two data centers with protection across the full Layer 7 stack," says Kuan Leong Lai.

"The quick responsiveness of the technical support by Hillstone TAC as well as the R-D teams have made us feel that are in trusted hands.

Bank of China Macau manages 36 sub-branches with assets totalling over 600 Billion in MOP, owning more than 40% of the local market share in mainstream businesses such as savings, loans and profit.