MUMBAI, India., May 25, 2005 - Fortinet - the pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions - today announced that Mahanagar Gas Limited has selected Fortinet to provide antivirus and firewall protection for its network.

Mahanagar Gas Limited is an integrated gas utility company based in Mumbai that supplies affordable piped natural gas directly to over 600,000 homes in Mumbai. Presently, MGL has connected to more than 180,000 households in the metropolitan area, and runs a network of Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) filling stations across the city, fueling vehicles that run on it. Since the company started in 1995, it has experienced phenomenal growth. It now has a network of about 15 servers and 200 workstations, running a variety of applications and services, from email and the company intranet, to workflow applications, technical libraries and a mission-critical database running on Oracle 9i. With a planned EP project currently underway, the company quickly understood that security would be a high-priority issue.

The company's primary concern was patching vulnerabilities in the network. Incidents of virii, spyware and other types of malware infections had affected network performance and availability and, in some cases, had even brought normal daily operations to a grinding halt. Mahanagar Gas decided to conduct an IT security audit to identify loopholes and vulnerabilities in the network, and to suggest needed features in a comprehensive security solution. The company eventually selected Fortinet for its breadth and depth of features and also for the FortiProtect network, a service that keeps the FortiGate series of antivirus firewalls up to date with the latest virii, worms, Trojans and other malware, automatically.

Mahanagar Gas purchased and deployed the FortiGate-300 antivirus firewall in mid-2004, and since then, it has seen a dramatic drop in the number of intrusions and infections. The company has also been impressed that the performance of the network has not been compromised.

"We have experienced phenomenal wire-line performance and robust security on our networks," said Mr. Hemant Joshi, Assistant Manager (IT) for Mahanagar Gas Ltd. "Fortinet provided a demo unit for us to try for a few days, and we found that implementation was smooth with minimum difficulties. We liked the IPS and bandwidth shaping functions and the fact that Fortinet had achieved all four ICSA certifications certainly helped. The feature-set certainly fulfilled most of the suggestions for improvement in the IT security audit. But it was the network performance after the deployment that most impressed us. There was no compromise between speed and security in Fortinet's case."

The FortiGate-300A platform features two 10/100/1000 tri-speed Ethernet ports for networks running at or upgrading to gigabit speeds. 4 user-definable 10/100 ports can be assigned to provide redundant WAN links, high availability, and multi-zone capabilities, allowing administrators a high degree of flexibility to segment their network into zones and create policies to control network traffic between zones. The FortiGate-300A Antivirus Firewall is particularly suited for medium sized businesses, branch and satellite offices, reducing exposure to threats by detecting and preventing over 1300 different intrusions, including DoS and DDoS attacks. The FortiGate-300A is kept up to date automatically by Fortinet's FortiProtect Network, which provides continuous updates, ensuring protection against the latest viruses, worms, Trojans and other threats, around the clock and around the world.

Mr Jens Andreassen, Vice President of International Sales explains, "Performance and ease of deployment are often overlooked by security vendors in favor of security features. Some system administrators even believe that speed and security are mutually exclusive, but with our ASIC hardware-accelerated platform, this need not be so, as our customers around the world have found. Utility companies, universities and financial institutions use our products in the most demanding environments. We are glad that Mahangar Gas has found a solution that achieves the level of security that they need without sacrificing performance, availability and uptime."