Central Management and Enhanced Security for Tamba City
The City Government of Tamba, Japan, gets centralized management for more than 100 facilities with AMF, plus cutting-edge security with AMF-Sec.
Customer: | Industry: | Location: |
City Government of Tamba | Government | Tamba City, Hyogo Prefecture |
We wanted to easily visualize the network and enable simple and efficient management of all devices–across all 100 locations. And we needed to secure it all with powerful security features.
Assistant Director of General Policy Planning Division, Planning and General Affairs Department,
City Government of Tamba
Tamba City, Hyogo Prefecture
Location: Tamba-shi, Hyogo
Area: 21 km2
Population: 64,150 people (as of 2019)
Tamba is a central eastern city in Japan’s Hyogo Prefecture. Located in the middle of a hilly and mountainous area, including Mt. Awaga at the east end of the Chugoku Mountains, the city features bountiful nature and tourism resources.
The Customer: City Government of Tamba
Tamba City was established in 2004 as the result of a merger of six towns. At this time, a regional intranet was built to link the six towns. This Wide Area Network (WAN) encompasses government offices in the central city and in the regions, as well as centrally managed elementary and junior high schools.
In 2010 Tamba City replaced around one-third of their network equipment. This upgrade aimed to reduce network outages, as loss of connectivity was extremely detrimental to the efficient governance of Tamba city. There was, however, ongoing concern about the support of the remaining older network devices, which required a lot of time by skilled engineers to maintain. Because the government had no dedicated network monitoring tools, time was often wasted isolating failures and restoring network services.
“We were experiencing network loops, which can bring a network to a standstill. Once we realized the failure had occurred, restoring online connectivity took quite some time,” says Mr. Kazuya Yamasaki, Assistant Director of the General Policy Planning Division, City Government of Tamba.
The Mission: Simplified Management, Guaranteed Security
It was definitely time to bring Tamba City’s government network into the future. They decided on a total upgrade to a next-generation network solution—with two major goals: simplified management, and state-of-the-art network security.
The solution was simple: replace all their old equipment with Allied Telesis devices centrally controlled by Allied Telesis Autonomous Management Framework™ (AMF)—in all 100 city offices, regional offices, and schools. Meanwhile, for cutting-edge security, the Tamba City Board of Education introduced AMF Security (AMF-Sec) to enable automatic protection against cyber-attack, and data-leakage prevention, for the school networks.
Related
Simplified Management for over 100 Locations
City Offices
Schools
Regional Offices
Centralized Management and Automated Recovery With AMF
AMF simplifies and automates network administration. Powerful features like centralized management, auto-back, auto-upgrade, and auto-recovery enable plug-and-play networking with zero-touch recovery. Mr. Yamasaki is very happy, saying “With AMF, we don’t need to dispatch engineers with special skills to restore network operations. Any staff member can replace network equipment, so we can restore network operations quickly. This is one of the biggest reasons we decided to introduce Allied Telesis products.”
Enhancing Security With AMF-Sec
AMF-Sec is a state-of-the-art network security solution, with an intelligent SDN controller that works with firewalls and other security devices to instantly respond to malware alerts, and automatically block the movement of threats within a wired or wireless network by quarantining any suspect devices.
Mr. Yasuhiro Tokura, Manager of the Educational Information Management Section of the City Government of Tamba, explains the need for a powerful security solution: “In 2016, one of our schools was the target of a cyberattack. Although we didn’t lose any information, we saw the need for an intelligent solution that would automatically block threats.”
AMF-Sec is partnered with a Trend Micro security device, to instantly block any detected malware threats. “Allied Telesis demonstrated AMF-Sec, and we could tell it would work well for us,” says Mr. Tokura. “We are so pleased to say that since the implementation, no further suspicious behavior has occurred. We will continue protecting our sensitive network data with AMF-Sec.”
We have attained total security for our network and all of our digital systems and information, thanks to AMF-Sec.
Manager of the Educational Information Management Section, School Affairs Division,
City Government of Tamba
City Governance Supported and Secured
The new solution has met all of Tamba City’s requirements, with automated and simplified management partnered with instant cyber threat protection ensuring always-on access to government information, digital learning tools for the schools, as well as the protection of digital assets.
Allied Telesis Vista Manager EX network management and monitoring tool provides graphical visibility into the entire AMF network, with identification of any network problems or security threats, greatly reducing administration and support. Mr Yamasaki highly rates the new solution, saying “If there should be any problem, we can identify it immediately and visually. Operations management is so much easier than before.”
