Project Background
The Ontario Energy Board (OEB) is charged with regulating a large, complex and dynamic industry. It relies heavily on information and information technology to manage its processes, make regulatory decisions, stay on top of the energy market in Ontario, and disseminate information about the market to all its stakeholders - the Ministry of Energy, market participants, consumers and interested parties such as special interest groups.
The OEB is planning to upgrade the current Cisco Firewalls with the Fortinet technology. The OEB recognizes the strategic importance of this infrastructure to fulfilling its objectives, and is committed to making a commensurate long-term investment in maintaining and developing this infrastructure in accordance with its requirements.
Required to implement because of the new high speed Internet connections and to utilize the SD-WAN technology.
Current OEB Environment:
The current OEB IT infrastructure backbone is built on the Cisco system, HP and Citrix technologies & products. See below:
- Cisco L2 (Access) and L3 (Core) Switches - Provides connectivity to all the devices on a Local Area Network.
- Cisco WAN Routers - Provide connectivity to Internet.
- Cisco Wireless System - Provide WiFi connectivity to all the OEB staff, contractors and guests.
- Cisco ASA Firewalls with Firepower - Provides network visibility and control, Intrusion prevention system (IPS), threats and advance malware protection.
- Cisco DUO (MFA) - Provide a second factor of authentication for OEB Staff and contractors to access any OEB resources (Servers, applications, databases) remotely.
- HP Fibre Switches - Provides FC connectivity to storage and servers via a high-speed network of interconnected fibre channel switches.
- HP Storage (SAN) - Provides block-level storage to all the servers that are connected through HP SAN.
- HPE BladeSystem Chassis - Holds up to 16 server blades and provides connectivity to network and storage interconnects (up to 4 redundant interconnect I/O fabrics (10GB Fibre Channel).
- Citrix Netscaler - Provide single sign-on across all applications weather in datacenter, in a cloud or delivered as SaaS. It allows OEB to access specific apps from a single URL.
- Citrix XenApp - Provide application virtualization that delivers centrally hosted windows applications to local devices without the necessity of installing them.
Objectives
The project objective is to add two new Fortinet Firewalls and migrate all the functionality from the current Cisco Firewall with the exception of Cisco VPN access and Wireless.
- Provide a better, more secure network experience
- Increase network reliability and speed
- SD-WAN connectivity
- Security and encryption for every kind of traffic and data
- Provide needed new services that currently cannot be implemented due to outdated infrastructure components
- Provide a better user bandwidth experience
- Minimize single points of failure
- Reduce maintenance cost
- Cloud based applications (Azure, AWS, office365, etc.)
- Reduce total operating costs
- Agile and responsive to business requirements
The term of the assignment is for two (2) months with no extensions.
Full details are provided in the RFQ document which is available only through MERX at www.merx.com or 1-800-964-6379, MERX reference number 170183.
