Customer Profile: Regal Cinemas

Established in 1989, Regal Cinemas is the fastest growing and largest cinema chain in the world. As one of the youngest theatre chains, Regal has risen to the top of the industry in terms of number of screens and screens per theatre. With more than 3500 screens throughout the United States, Regal prides itself on being at the forefront of technology.

Regal's network planning group is tasked with providing the highest level of security while maintaining daily operations. Like many leading companies, Regal turned to Check Point™ Software Technologies and it's certified OPSEC™ (Open Platform for Security) partners for the broad range of capabilities and strong integration of our products.

According to Andrew Bagrin, Manager of Network Planning, security is always at the top of the list with the company. "Not a day goes by that someone doesn't try to gain access into our network from the outside. But thanks to Check Point's products and OPSEC Certified solutions, we have peace of mind."

Bagrin was brought on board after helping to redesign the security network. "The previous network was very labor intensive and required manual input by the network administrators. We knew that we needed to focus on eBusiness initiatives and the ability to have our traveling support technicians log into the network from any where in the nation was key."

He found success by implementing Check Point VPN-1®/FireWall-1® with VPN-1 SecuRemote™. "The VPN has allowed us to move from a dial-up environment, increase communication with remote workers and greatly reduce our networking costs. Check Point's VPN/FireWall-1 runs seamlessly and has become mission critical to our business."

Giving remote technicians access from the field has been a large benefit to Regal. It has allowed the company the ability to connect those field technicians to the network and solve any issue that a theatre may have. Regal has also been able to have 100 percent up time with high availability/ load balancing through the VPN gateways. "The VPN infrastructure allows us to grow, we now have the ability to standardize the entire network and it makes my job much easier. In a matter of hours we can securely give new users access to the network," says Bagrin.

With the added help of Check Point and OPSEC, Regal Cinemas has been able to secure corporate resources, allow remote access and enforce the internal security policy in a flexible environment. "We basically don't use other vendor's products unless they are OPSEC certified. I know that the products will seamlessly integrate with the currently installed Check Point products," adds Bagrin. "This type of interoperability is beneficial to anyone looking to work with OPSEC.

Regal currently has six different OPSEC vendor products installed. To meet the high availability/load-balancing needs of the network, Regal chose Stonesoft's Full Cluster, while enforcing content security with a virus gateway scanning product from Esafe, virus gateway scanning from Aladdin Knowledge Systems and X-Stop, a URL filtering solution from 8e6 Technologies. In order to maximize the integration with FireWall-1, Regal added three Internet Security Systems (ISS) RealSecure engines for intrusion detection. "We use RealSecure to monitor the traffic from our theatres and also for internal and external monitoring," said Bagrin. They are also leveraging Check Point's Meta IP™ to provide user-based-policy, DHCP and DNS services.

Internal security threats were also taken into consideration and Regal chose to implement Check Point FireWall-1 to control employees' access to confidential corporate information of connected theatres and outside vendors. A Stonesoft high availability firewall cluster also partitions it. "The firewall and VPN allows our employees a secure way to gain access to the information that they need," says Bagrin.

Another concern for the company was having a secure eBusiness environment for customers visiting their corporate website, regalcinemas.com. "We have a very high volume of traffic in the evening hours," Bagrin says. "During the holiday season gift certificates are in especially high demand and we feel confident that our customers privacy is securely protected."

Bagrin adds that this type of alliance benefits the customer. "Check Point is the leader in the security industry, leading with best-of-breed technology in the firewall and VPN marketspace. I will continue to turn to them for security needs and to their OPSEC partners as well."