Scottish Police College Secures World Class Law Enforcement Training Network With Enterasys

Enterasys Networks Inc., the Secure Networks Company(TM), announced today that the Scottish Police College, part of the Scottish Police Services, has continued its relationship with Enterasys to strengthen and secure its networked environment, which supplies connectivity for more than 800 students, faculty, and staff. The Enterasys solution's easy-to-use NetSight® management platform allows the law enforcement college's two part-time IT employees to optimize network service quality while improving the institution's data reliability and security for its on-campus students, as well as for the recently launched distance learning program. The 100-year-old castle that houses the College posed challenges when implementing the state-of-the art voice, video and data network infrastructure; however, the Enterasys RoamAbout® wireless technologies avoided cabling issues while providing secure guest networking for attendees of its seminars, conferences and training courses.

The Scottish Police College provides about 75 percent of all law enforcement training in the country, including specialist training for detectives and traffic officers. All of Scotland's current 14,500 police officers are graduates of the College. With an estimated 1,500 new police recruits entering the College's prestigious program in the coming year, the IT staff at the Scottish Police College recognized the need to maintain a modern, secure network that would scale with the diverse uses and requirements of the increasing number of students, faculty and guests, while keeping management requirements uncomplicated. The College also required a solution that would be affordable within the constraints of their public sector budget and provide interoperability with existing vendor equipment, including Nokia Check Point firewalls. Enterasys met all of these criteria.

"Our students and faculty require a connection that is always available to help with their research, studying and communications, while our staff requires constant network security," said Derek Scott, head of the IT department at the Scottish Police College. "Enterasys gives us the reliability and proactive protection we require, with a simple and intuitive at-a-glance status snapshot that allows our small team to have granular visibility and control over who and what is on the network."

The College's network consists of 400 networked devices on its campus grounds, spread across 75 acres. This network provides role-based access to applications, communications such as e-mail and instant messaging, and allows approved users to connect via a secure link to the National Police Network in London. The network also supports online courses for remote learning students, a program which just launched last year.

"Our network is transparent to our users -- all they know is, they plug in and it works," Scott explained. "Enterasys has the built-in security, cost-effectiveness, ease of management, reliability and performance qualities that public sector organizations like ours need to succeed."

According to Scott, since incorporating Enterasys solutions into the campus network, malware and other virus incidents have disappeared. The network is built using Enterasys SecureStack(TM) B-Series and C-Series switches at the access layer with SmartSwitch(TM) Routers at the core. Security is embedded into every network connection with L2/L3/L4 classification, bandwidth flow control and traffic prioritization to support IP telephony (VoIP) and IP Multicast (IPMC) voice/video/data convergence applications. The college also plans to deploy the Enterasys Dragon® Intrusion Detection/Prevention System in the coming months.

"We appreciate the personalized service and responsiveness of the local Enterasys team," Scott continued. "Their support has been outstanding for me, my team, and the college. They have never let us down."

About Enterasys

Enterasys is owned by a private investor group led by The Gores Group, LLC and Tennenbaum Capital Partners, LLC. Enterasys delivers Secure Networks(TM) that ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of IT services and the business users that rely on them -- without sacrificing performance. Thousands of enterprises, government agencies and educational institutions in more than 70 countries worldwide rely on our convergence, compliance and connectivity solutions to deliver business-oriented, policy-based visibility and control of individual user and application priority and security. The company's culture is centered on the principle, "There is nothing more important than our customers." Enterasys' standards-based, open-architecture approach to network security offers a long technology lifecycle and significant operational and business benefits, while reducing total cost of ownership. Information about Enterasys' award winning, policy-enabled switches, routers, wireless products, security software and services is available at www.enterasys.com .

About The Gores Group

Founded in 1987, The Gores Group, LLC is a private equity firm focused on acquiring controlling interests in mature and growing businesses which can benefit from the firm's operating experience and flexible capital base. The firm combines the operational expertise and detailed due diligence capabilities of a strategic buyer with the seasoned M&A team of a traditional financial buyer. The Gores Group, LLC has become a leading investor having demonstrated over time a reliable track record of creating substantial value in its portfolio companies alongside management. The firm's current private equity fund has committed equity capital of $1.3 billion. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, The Gores Group, LLC maintains offices in Boulder, Colorado and London. For more information, please visit www.gores.com .