RAMS Home Loans has bought a third unified threat management appliance from WatchGuard partner Harbour IT, this time to enable franchisees to securely access its corporate network.

The home loan provider implemented two of the Firebox X Peak 5500e UTM appliances at its Sydney-based headquarters earlier this year.

The success of this initial deployment led to the additional box purchase, which will secure franchisee ‘access to the Internet and centrally held corporate data, including business files, email and Internet applications’, the company said in a statement.

The new box is expected to go live this week.

RAMS has independently-owned franchisees operating in over 90 home loan centres in both metropolitan and regional areas.

“We needed a modular security solution which could guarantee seamless and immediate integration to the company’s corporate MPLS network,” said Mark Austin, Head of IT at the RAMS Financial Group.

“WatchGuard came to the table with a complete security solution, incorporating content management, anti-virus, spam filtering and reporting. We found it easy to implement compared to our previous Cisco and CheckPoint solutions.”