Customer Story: City of Perth

Company Overview:
The City of Perth is a dynamic, statutory entity constituted under the Local Government Act 1995 to provide services and facilities to a broad range of City stakeholders including residents, commercial and retail business, worker and local and international visitors.

Perth, the capital of Western Australia, has grown rapidly and seen tremendous revitalisation boosted by strong industry as well as population growth.

The City of Perth manages policy framework to serve the City community sustainably and to provide essential services to more than 150,000 people who use the city each day for work, or as a tourist and shopping destination, playing a vital role in the development of the State’s largest and most thriving business hub.

Business Challenge:
The City of Perth was dependent upon its Cisco Secure Access Control Server (ACS) to provide a number of security functions to ensure compliance with PCI requirements, namely:

• Network device administration: Authenticates administrators, authorises commands and provides an audit trail through Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System Plus (TACAS+)
• Wireless: Authenticates and authorises wireless users (RADIUS) and hosts and enforces wireless-specific policies.

With Cisco ACS being superseded by Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and no longer supported or maintained by Cisco, the City of Perth had the requirement to replace ACS with the more advanced and feature-rich ISE product.

“We had a specific requirement to transition from Cisco ACS to ISE and Data^#3 were very knowledgeable and provided a detailed proposal for City of Perth to review. The project phase – was executed very efficiently with good project manager and senior engineers to deliver outcomes. Overall, it was a great experience with Data^#3, who delivered a successful project on time and on budget.”

Ross Wood, Network Administrator, City of Perth

Solution:
The City of Perth approached Data^#3 to seek advice around the best strategy for their ageing ACS appliances. As a long time Cisco Gold Partner and a fully certified ISE ATP partner, Data^#3 was well placed to provide a solution to the City of Perth.

Data^#3 recommended the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) as the best solution to provide RADIUS and TACACS+ network access control.

In addition, this market-leading platform would scale to provide a feature-rich policy management solution to the City.

Tight integration with the wired/wireless network and pre-existing directory services would allow for a comprehensive suite of security controls which can be developed over time, as required.

Outcome:
Data^#3 provided a fully project managed, fixed price, professional services engagement to design, deploy, optimise and document the Cisco ISE solution for the City of Perth.

The result was a pair of ISE appliances virtualised on VMware ESXi hosts, with the appropriate licensing.

The solution was sized to provide AAA, guest services and reporting for the City of Perth, on both the wired and wireless environments. The solution provides the required scale, security, flexibility, resilience and future proofing for the City of Perth, now and into the future.

Mindful of security audit compliance needs, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and the Australian Information Security Manual (ISM) recommendations, the solution was architected and deployed to meet the 2015 ISM principles for:

• Access Control
• Secure Administration
• Network Security

The solution was developed and completed after close collaboration between the City of Perth and Data^#3 to ensure that the service delivered met, and wherever possible, exceeded the customers’ expectations.

Download the City of Perth customer snapshot.

To learn more about how Data^#3 can assist your organisation, call 1300 23 28 23, or Enquire Online.