Meritz Fire & Marine Mobilizes Staff Through Juniper Networks

Meritz Fire & Marine Mobilizes Staff Through Juniper Networks

Leading Korean Non-Life Insurer Rolls Out Large-scale VPN Access for Anytime, Anywhere Customer Service

Seoul, May 6, 2010 — Juniper Networks® (NYSE: JNPR) today announced that Meritz Fire & Marine Insurance Co., Ltd (SEO: 000060), one of South Korea's leading non-life insurers, has adopted a high-performance, high-availability internal and external security solution. The deployment of Juniper Networks' ISG2000 Integrated Security Gateway enables Meritz Fire's sales force to remotely access account information and transact new business, while system administrators use Juniper's Network & Security Manager to enforce consistent polices across the network and respond rapidly to security threats.

The insurance company is the cornerstone of the Meritz Financial Services Group, with affiliates in asset management, banking, and securities. Formed in response to Korea's Capital Market Integration Act, which removed barriers between different financial sectors, the Meritz Group leverages IT to increase business agility, enabling it to respond more rapidly to customer demand and market shifts.

"Increasing sales agility meant giving our team the tools to streamline customer engagements, which in turn was contingent to having a high-capacity VPN gateway," said Lee Sang Ho, head of IT Planning at Meritz Fire & Marine Insurance. "Compared to the same class of equipment from other vendors, Juniper's ISG2000 had twice the throughput but that was by no means the determining factor.

"We consider firewall reliability to be critical since any problems could have serious repercussions for our business. We also looked at maintenance and vendor stability factors before deciding that Juniper's was the most appropriate solution."

Based on an ASIC architecture with hardware component redundancy, the ISG2000 provides Meritz Fire with comprehensive security capable of sub-second failover between interfaces. A full mesh configuration allows redundant physical paths throughout the network, thereby providing maximum resiliency and uptime while provides linear firewall and IPsec VPN performance for all packet sizes at gigabit levels.

"There is a huge amount of focus on smart-phones, net-pads and other mobile devices but to leverage them for workforce mobility requires an enabling network security infrastructure," said Tim Kang, vice president, Korea, Juniper Networks. "Meritz Fire's deployment of Juniper Networks ISG200 and Network & Security Manager is a prime example of an enterprise getting it's mobility strategy right from the start."

In addition to protecting the Meritz network from external threats, the ISG2000s detects abnormalities in outbound traffic while security policies enforced by the Network & Security Manager (NMS) isolate infected devices immediately, enabling the network to continue operating at maximum efficiency. Meritz Fire's network administrators are also able to perform simulations on the NMS for verification to minimize errors when implementing new security policies.

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