Case Study

PensionsFirst Delivers Secure and Scalable Web Application Access with F5 BIG-IP Solutions

Business Challenges

To better meet the needs of the company’s
rapidly growing customer base, the IT team
at PensionsFirst made a strategic decision
to move from a traditional client-server
architecture to a web-based application.
Their most immediate need was to find
a load balancing solution to ensure high
performance and reliability for users
accessing the web application, which
processes an extremely large volume of
financial data.

At the same time, the team was also
exploring new methods of handling the
two-factor authentication they had in
place to provide secure access to the
application. While the SSL VPN appliance
they were using was solid and reliable, it
was not scalable. “It met our needs, but it
wasn’t something we could upgrade,” said
Dean Newman, Director of Information
Technology at PensionsFirst. “We would
have reached a cap and then had to redesign
the environment.”

With this view to scaling with anticipated
growth, the team also wanted to minimize
the complexity of the environment and find
solutions that would not increase the overall
management burden.

Solution

On the recommendation of its technology
partner Dell, PensionsFirst initially looked
at F5 BIG‑IP® Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM)
to load balance the web application traffic.
As discussions with Dell and F5 progressed,
it became clear that the F5 BIG‑IP® Access
Policy Manager™ (APM) product was an
excellent fit to provide a more scalable
and manageable means to support the
company’s security authentication needs.
PensionsFirst purchased BIG‑IP LTM with
the BIG‑IP APM module.

BIG‑IP LTM manages web application traffic
to ensure that the PFaroe application always
delivers the fast, secure, and reliable online
experience pension managers need to access
their critical risk management information.
Users access the application through a log-in
portal that secures customer data by requiring
two-factor authentication, which BIG‑IP APM
supports as a result of its ability to integrate
with a wide range of user directory and
authentication servers and services.
With authentication, authorization, and
accounting control on the BIG‑IP system,
PensionsFirst is able to separate access
security from the processing environment
and manage it at the network level.
“We’ve built an iron fence around our web
application with BIG‑IP APM,” Newman
said. “It not only secures the application;
it helps us manage the traffic and the user
experience.”

PensionsFirst also takes advantage of F5’s
iRules® custom scripting language to modify
traffic to further protect its application
through resource cloaking. By selectively
filtering and blocking server headers and
codes that could reveal information about
PensionsFirst’s infrastructure, iRules prevents
malicious users from being able to find
vulnerabilities.

Benefits

By implementing the BIG‑IP solution with
the BIG‑IP APM module, PensionsFirst is
providing its customers with the top-level
security and performance they demand, and
has positioned its IT infrastructure to meet
rapid growth efficiently and cost-effectively.
Tier 1 security and compliance
The F5 solution has helped PensionsFirst
deliver the cutting-edge service that its
customers are seeking. Many of its users are
in Tier 1 organizations with very stringent
security and performance requirements.
“Our customers expect us to treat their data
in the same way they have to, with the same
level of security and compliance,” Newman
explained. “In choosing F5, we knew we had
selected a partner that would help us provide
the most secure, reliable, and performancebased
system that we could.”

Simple and efficient manageability

Newman finds that one of the most
compelling features of BIG-APM is the
Visual Policy Editor, an intuitive interface
for creating and managing access policies.
“We like its visual simplicity. You can see a
rule and know exactly what each step does,”
Newman said. “We have big aspirations as an
organization, so anything that can streamline
the efficiency of the IT operations team and
help us scale is very valuable to us.”
Scalability and a roadmap for the future
BIG‑IP APM offers multi-gigabit SSL
encrypted throughput that will enable
PensionsFirst to continue securing sensitive
customer data through an enormous amount
of growth. But scalability is about much
more than just security for PensionsFirst.
Newman says the company is also planning
to benefit from the ability to add modules to
gain more services from the BIG‑IP system as
it continues to expand.
“F5 offerings have provided us with a
roadmap to meet our strategic goals in terms
of business growth,” Newman explains. “Our
initial investment is protected because we
can continue adding services on the BIG‑IP
system as we require them without having
to reengineer our security environment.”
With the company’s second data centre
completed, Newman expects that BIG‑IP®
Global Traffic Manager™, which optimizes
the user experience by routing traffic to
the best-performing data centre, will be
an essential component in maintaining
business continuity. And in addition
to the performance-boosting BIG‑IP®
WebAccelerator™ product, PensionsFirst is
considering the BIG‑IP® WAN Optimization
Module™ to help manage data replication
and mirroring for its huge volumes of data.
“We’re going to create tens if not hundreds
of terabytes of data,” Newman said. “F5
is helping us with our ultimate goal of
protecting the infrastructure of the systems
and the data that reside on them, 24 hours
a day, seven days a week.”

Long-term ROI

While the IT team could have made the
previous security solution work to meet
its immediate needs with a lower budget,
they chose F5 solutions in anticipation of
future benefits that will continue to pay off
at every stage of the company’s growth.
Newman explained, “Long-term, we expect
the BIG‑IP system will save us time, money,
and resources in not having to redesign the
environment as we grow.”

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