Remote Work Central

V-One Satellite VPN Case Study

Tom Brown, Inc. (NYSE: TBI) is a Denver, Colorado based independent energy company engaged in the exploration for, and the development, acquisition, production and marketing of natural gas, natural gas liquids and crude oil. The Company’s proven growth strategy balances acquisitions with drill bit opportunities.
Tom Brown’s focus areas today include primarily the gas prone basins of the U.S. and Canadian Rocky Mountains and East and West Texas.
The Challenge: Tom Brown, Inc., required a means to move sensitive scientific and industry data from multiple remote sites in the field. The goal was to augment their existing frame relay network by implementing a virtual private network (VPN) over satellite to support traffic to and from mobile laptops.
The IP data files are quite large, ranging in size from .5 MB to 20-30MB, and originate from over a dozen remote sites. The implementation would triple the number of users, all attempting to gain access to the company’s internal network. It was imperative that the solution be robust, reliable, and operate in a secure fashion.
With typical IPSec VPN solutions, performance is significantly degraded over the satellite link due to propagation delay. Private satellite links are costly to set up. With the need to transfer very large files, Tom Brown, Inc., required a cost effective security solution that would overcome performance problems experienced by the other VPN solutions.
The V-ONE SmartGate® Solution:
Tom Brown, Inc., selected V-ONE SmartGate client/server technology to protect their satellite data communications, increasing the effectiveness of their field operations for natural gas production. The V-ONE high-performance solution delivers strong encryption, authentication, access control and other VPN services from an end user's system all the way to a secure gateway over a satellite link, allowing end-to-end protection. By using Application Layer technology, SmartGate is compatible with a satellite network's TCP protocol acceleration/spoofing capabilities, thereby avoiding the adverse impact of high latency satellite links.
In addition to its ability to overcome performance problems associated with end-to-end security, the V-ONE SmartGate technology provides Tom Brown, Inc., with ease of user installation and remote deployment, and simplicity of management.
Meeting Future Security Requirements:
While SmartGate was initially chosen to secure satellite data communications, the flexibility that the V-ONE solution provides Tom Brown, Inc. has made it the VPN of choice for the remote access needs of the organization. Tom Brown, Inc., will use V-ONE technology for all of their VPN connections.

“Our users have taken to the V-ONE solution quite easily. It is almost nothing to get it installed and up and running. The whole VPN over satellite network performance problem simply went away.” - Pete Monfiletto, Chief Technical Architect, Tom Brown, Inc.

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