Scottish Police College Secures World Class Law Enforcement Training Network With Enterasys
Scotland's Recruits Rely on Enterasys to Enable Distance Learning and Support Modern Investigation Techniques
ANDOVER, MA--(Marketwire - April 8, 2008) - Enterasys Networks Inc., the Secure Networks
Company™, announced today that the Scottish Police College, part of the
Scottish Police Services, has continued its relationship with Enterasys to
strengthen and secure its networked environment, which supplies
connectivity for more than 800 students, faculty, and staff. The Enterasys
solution's easy-to-use NetSight® management platform allows the law
enforcement college's two part-time IT employees to optimize network
service quality while improving the institution's data reliability and
security for its on-campus students, as well as for the recently launched
distance learning program. The 100-year-old castle that houses the College
posed challenges when implementing the state-of-the art voice, video and
data network infrastructure; however, the Enterasys RoamAbout® wireless
technologies avoided cabling issues while providing secure guest networking
for attendees of its seminars, conferences and training courses.
The Scottish Police College provides about 75 percent of all law
enforcement training in the country, including specialist training for
detectives and traffic officers. All of Scotland's current 14,500 police
officers are graduates of the College. With an estimated 1,500 new police
recruits entering the College's prestigious program in the coming year, the
IT staff at the Scottish Police College recognized the need to maintain a
modern, secure network that would scale with the diverse uses and
requirements of the increasing number of students, faculty and guests,
while keeping management requirements uncomplicated. The College also
required a solution that would be affordable within the constraints of
their public sector budget and provide interoperability with existing
vendor equipment, including Nokia Check Point firewalls. Enterasys met all
of these criteria.
"Our students and faculty require a connection that is always available to
help with their research, studying and communications, while our staff
requires constant network security," said Derek Scott, head of the IT
department at the Scottish Police College. "Enterasys gives us the
reliability and proactive protection we require, with a simple and
intuitive at-a-glance status snapshot that allows our small team to have
granular visibility and control over who and what is on the network."
The College's network consists of 400 networked devices on its campus
grounds, spread across 75 acres. This network provides role-based access to
applications, communications such as e-mail and instant messaging, and
allows approved users to connect via a secure link to the National Police
Network in London. The network also supports online courses for remote
learning students, a program which just launched last year.
"Our network is transparent to our users -- all they know is, they plug in
and it works," Scott explained. "Enterasys has the built-in security,
cost-effectiveness, ease of management, reliability and performance
qualities that public sector organizations like ours need to succeed."
According to Scott, since incorporating Enterasys solutions into the campus
network, malware and other virus incidents have disappeared. The network
is built using Enterasys SecureStack™ B-Series and C-Series switches at
the access layer with SmartSwitch™ Routers at the core. Security is
embedded into every network connection with L2/L3/L4 classification,
bandwidth flow control and traffic prioritization to support IP telephony
(VoIP) and IP Multicast (IPMC) voice/video/data convergence applications.
The college also plans to deploy the Enterasys Dragon® Intrusion
Detection/Prevention System in the coming months.
"We appreciate the personalized service and responsiveness of the local
Enterasys team," Scott continued. "Their support has been outstanding for
me, my team, and the college. They have never let us down."
About Enterasys
Enterasys is owned by a private investor group led by The Gores Group, LLC
and Tennenbaum Capital Partners, LLC. Enterasys delivers Secure
Networks™ that ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability
of IT services and the business users that rely on them -- without
sacrificing performance. Thousands of enterprises, government agencies and
educational institutions in more than 70 countries worldwide rely on our
convergence, compliance and connectivity solutions to deliver
business-oriented, policy-based visibility and control of individual user
and application priority and security. The company's culture is centered
on the principle, "There is nothing more important than our customers."
Enterasys' standards-based, open-architecture approach to network security
offers a long technology lifecycle and significant operational and business
benefits, while reducing total cost of ownership. Information about
Enterasys' award winning, policy-enabled switches, routers, wireless
products, security software and services is available at www.enterasys.com.
About The Gores Group
Founded in 1987, The Gores Group, LLC is a private equity firm focused on
acquiring controlling interests in mature and growing businesses which can
benefit from the firm's operating experience and flexible capital base. The
firm combines the operational expertise and detailed due diligence
capabilities of a strategic buyer with the seasoned M&A team of a
traditional financial buyer. The Gores Group, LLC has become a leading
investor having demonstrated over time a reliable track record of creating
substantial value in its portfolio companies alongside management. The
firm's current private equity fund has committed equity capital of $1.3
billion. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, The Gores Group, LLC
maintains offices in Boulder, Colorado and London. For more information,
please visit www.gores.com.
About Tennenbaum Capital Partners, LLC
Tennenbaum Capital Partners is a Santa Monica, California-based private
investment firm managing over $7.5 billion in committed capital in private
funds. The firm's investment strategy is grounded in a long-term, value
approach, and it assists -- both financially and operationally --
transitional middle market companies in such industries as technology,
healthcare, energy, aerospace, business services, retail and general
manufacturing. Tennenbaum's core strengths include in-depth knowledge of
equity and debt financing vehicles in the public and private markets, as
well as a thorough understanding of special situations. For more
information, please visit www.tennenbaumcapital.com.