Case Study: NEC Group achieves consolidated, high-performance event network security and increased revenue with Fortinet

Fortinet Performs Under the Security Spotlight for the NEC Group

The NEC Group, which operates major UK venues (NEC, ICC, Genting Arena, Barclaycard Arena) plus businesses like The Ticket Factory and Amadeus, needed to provide a stable, secure, high-performance broadband experience for around four million annual visitors and hundreds of events. IT needed to consolidate firewall capabilities across multiple business units while meeting gigabit performance, high availability, advanced threat protection, logical traffic separation and easy, centralized management.

NEC implemented Fortinet FortiGate clusters (FortiGate 310B for event networks and FortiGate 600C for business assets) with VDOMs, FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer. The deployment delivered multi‑gigabit throughput, traffic shaping that cut peak demand to ~300 Mbps (enabling cost-saving 1 Gbps links), strict logical separation for exhibitor services, improved compliance and new revenue opportunities (e.g., white‑label ticketing), simplified administration and strong reliability—handling spikes such as 5,000 ticket sales in 100 seconds without disruption.

NEC Group

Patrick McLiddy

Systems & Infrastructure Manager