As the UK's exclusive distributor of Apple's iPhone for the last two years, O2 has felt the full impact of the explosion in smartphone usage, with an 18-fold increase in data traffic since the start of 2009. This traffic continues to double every four months due to the growing popularity of smartphones to surf the Web or watch videos.

Because smartphones allow a subscriber to open multiple, concurrent Internet sessions-each of which must be secured-O2 needed a high-performance network security platform that could scale with these demands and turned to Crossbeam's X-Series to provide the solution.

"Every time a mobile user opens an application like Google Maps, it automatically creates 20 or more sessions that need to be protected," said Ian Waggott, head of technical security for Telefünica O2. "Crossbeam offers the only solution that can easily handle the more than 6 million sessions operating concurrently on our networks. As a mobile operator, it's imperative that we can ensure the continued protection of our users as network traffic and bandwidth demands grow, without impacting performance. Crossbeam is a true visionary when it comes to delivering consolidated, scalable and high-performance security."

Both O2 and its parent company Telefünica have been using the X-Series for years to consolidate multiple security services on the chassis, benefitting from the cost-savings, ease of management and power consumption advantages of the platform. When O2 started experiencing the massive growth in network traffic due to smartphone usage, the company reevaluated the market's leading security vendors offering high-performance firewalls. Once again, Crossbeam outperformed its competitors.

"When you look at high-performance firewalls, there are very few vendors that can effectively do network address translations (NAT) under heavy traffic loads," added Waggott. "Crossbeam's X-Series delivering Check Point's firewall was by far the best solution on the market, delivering high availability and throughput under real-world conditions, even with NAT enabled."

Crossbeam's X-Series security platform virtualizes best-in-class security applications on a scalable, carrier-class chassis. Customers benefit from a simplified architecture that delivers high-performance security at the industry's lowest total cost to operate-40 to 70 percent lower than competitors-and provides unparalleled flexibility, scalability and built-in redundancy to intelligently manage traffic as security and network demands change. Today more than 900 leading enterprises and service providers, including 10 of the top 11 telecom carriers worldwide, rely on the X-Series. (continued...)

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