Financial Services | First Command

Adonis Enables First Command to Take Back Control of Its Network

BACKGROUND

Acting on a deep desire to help America’s military families effectively plan for their financial futures, U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Carroll H. Payne laid the groundwork in 1958 for First Command Financial Services. A Registered Investment Adviser firm, First Command today serves nearly 300,000 clients from all walks of life, developing and delivering comprehensive financial plans to assist clients in their efforts to build wealth, reduce debt and pursue their lifetime financial goals and dreams.

OPPORTUNITY

First Command had been outsourcing its DNS to an external host. Service responsiveness from the host had become an issue, causing significant delays in DNS management and administration. Making any changes such as zones, subnets or resource records involved several phone calls to the service provider, and those calls often went unreturned. First Command also wanted to be able to obtain better statistics on its DNS to make accurate assessments of the status and availability of the company’s DNS services.

First Command wanted a DNS appliance with an extremely secure, hardened operating system. “We were putting the appliance out in the cold, hard world, outside of our firewall, so it had to be secure,” said Kevin Dunn, Director of Network Operations at First Command, “We needed the most secure and highly available appliance out there”. Above all, the firm wanted to be able to manage its own DNS services effectively and with minimal delays or service downtime.

SOLUTION

First Command selected the Adonis 1000 DNS/DHCP Appliance™ from BlueCat Networks to deliver advanced DNS management capabilities and ensure efficient, secure and highly available network operation. The Adonis 1000 features a hardened, Linux-based operating system running the latest BIND software, with a minimal number of open ports that could serve as points of entry for hackers. Adonis also assures server security by requiring the integrated firewall to reject any network traffic not related to DNS or the Adonis Management Console (AMC). BlueCat’s award-winning AMC is an intuitive GUI, based on cross platform Java™ technology that combines sophisticated software tools and wizards, with powerful time-saving features. In addition to simplifying server management for administrators, the AMC’s design favors a one-to-many client/server architecture instead of a simplistic Web interface, making the management system unavailable to external attacks.

IMPACT

Using the Adonis 1000’s powerful Adonis Management Console, First Command’s network administrators have implemented complex networking technologies with ease, and adapt to emerging business requirements in a matter of minutes. The firm can instantly and independently generate a statistical summary of its DNS configurations and routinely obtain vital, real-time data about its network. “Adonis has allowed us to keep better track of our DNS,” Dunn said. “It’s a great product. It works well and we’ve enjoyed having it in the infrastructure.”