One of Britain’s largest independent corporate travel companies has established a Virtual Private Network between its five sites using the NetPilot Enterprise VPN secure server appliance from Equiinet. Fleet Street Travel, which has a turnover of £70 million, has been able to centralise its back office and email systems while freeing up bandwidth by clamping down on non work-related web surfing by employees.

James Baldwin, Fleet Street Travel’s IT director, says, “The enhanced web filtering in NetPilot Enterprise together with our own corporate white lists has stopped unnecessary surfing and resulted in far more available bandwidth.”

He said Fleet Street opted for NetPilot Plus because of its security credentials - including a firewall, VPN, N2H2-based web filtering and Sophos-based virus scanning - and its ease of use and reliability. NetPilot’s compatibility with multiple WAN interfaces is also key, as Fleet Street’s branches are equipped with a mixture of leased lines, ADSL and ISDN connections of varying capacity.

From a business perspective, NetPilot is also helping the company’s branches to speed up customer service through quicker access to up-to-date travel information.

NetPilot Enterprise VPN, which has been installed at Fleet Street’s offices in London, Manchester, Newcastle and Ireland (call centre) as well as its Chertsey headquarters, is a multifunctional, extremely secure Internet server appliance. Ideal for medium-sized organisations or as a VPN node at a branch office of a larger organisation, it is a straightforward way of providing data encryption to prevent transmissions being intercepted or tampered with.

p>“NetPilot VPN offers an easy and secure way for organisations to deploy Internet-based IPSec and CIPE based VPNs, Internet access and email facilities,” says Equiinet sales manager Jamie Pushman. “Unlike the myriad of limited firewall/VPN solutions on the market, NetPilot VPN is a multi-functional device offering everything an organisation needs to get on-line and communicate extremely securely.”

Equiinet’s VPN appliances can cover applications involving five to 500 networked PC users. The Equiinet approach is to offer a highly secure VPN in addition to the comprehensive ‘all-in-one-box’ functionality that a server appliance provides - router, firewall, email server, cache, web, file and print server.

Fleet Street Travel is ranked No. 17 in “The Leading 100 Business Travel Agents” (Business Travel World) with a turnover of £70 million.
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