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August 31, 2010 - Fortinet® - a leading network security provider and a worldwide leader of unified threat management (UTM) solutions – today announced that Pomerleau Construction, one of Canada’s largest construction companies, has deployed FortiGate®, FortiMail™ and FortiAnalyzer™ appliances across Canada to help secure the network of headquarter-based employees, travelling employees and those who work remotely.

Since 1964, Pomerleau Construction has been an important player in the construction industry. Today, the company leads the Quebec construction industry and offers full services from preconstruction to commissioning of building systems, ensuring that the project meets its customers’ expectations.

Previously using a network security solution that was difficult to manage and one that offered very little, if any, return on investment, Pomerleau Construction decided to replace the solution with multi-threat appliances designed to protect the corporate network from multi-faceted attacks.

Pomerleau Construction selected Fortinet’s multi-threat appliances over other solutions such as Cisco, WatchGuard, Barracuda and Sophos. The Fortinet appliances were the only ones that met the multifunction needs of Pomerleau Construction as well as its future security needs.

“Since deploying the FortiGate appliances, we have been able to take over more control of our network than we originally thought possible – all from a single consolidated appliance with antivirus, IPS, Web content filtering protection and application control,” said Eric Lessard, IT director for Pomerleau Construction. “We now have a means to defend our infrastructure with a fully redundant perimeter defense, all while taking advantage of Active Directory's users’ credentials for easy user rights management.”

Deployed throughout the Pomerleau Construction network are FortiGate, FortiMail and FortiAnalyzer appliances. Located at Pomerleau Construction’s headquarters are FortiGate appliances which are being used for firewall protection as well as traffic control and SSL VPN connectivity for employees on construction sites and those who are travelling. The appliances are being used to help protect more than 500 users located at 80 remote sites throughout Canada.

In addition, a FortiMail appliance is being used to help control spam traversing the network of more than 500 users. By being able to catch spam before it hits the inboxes of Pomerleau Construction employees, the FortiMail appliance is helping to make employees more productive because they don’t spend time reading and/or deleting spam email. In addition, the IT staff can also help protect email users from potential phishing and email threats. They are now able to control how emails flow through the network infrastructure and can therefore free up bandwidth from unwanted email traffic.

Also located at the Quebec headquarters is a FortiAnalyzer appliance which is being used to help monitor the network traffic and provide detailed information on network usage. Now, potential attacks can be monitored and analyzed, which gives the IT staff better insight into data traversing the network. Alarms can also be set so that anomalies from attacks can be checked in real time.

“Fortinet offers security solutions that help protect against multi-threat attacks by combining multiple functionalities into a single, cost effective solution that helps enterprises stay up to date with threats,” said Graham Bushkes, vice president of Canada at Fortinet. “Pomerleau Construction is a perfect example of an enterprise using Fortinet to help protect its distributed network.”

About FortiGate

Fortinet’s FortiGate systems are ASIC-accelerated security appliances that integrate core security and network functionalities including firewall, SSL and IPSec VPN, antivirus, intrusion prevention, Web filtering, antispam, application control, data loss prevention, SSL traffic inspection and WAN optimization. All FortiGate systems are kept up to date automatically by Fortinet’s FortiGuard® Network, which helps protect against the most damaging, content-based threats from email and Web traffic such as viruses, worms, intrusions, other unwanted network traffic and more - around the clock and around the world. Fortinet solutions have won multiple awards and are the only security products that are certified in five programs by ICSA Labs for firewall, antivirus, IPSec VPN, network IPS and antispam.