The National Fertilizers Limited (NFL) is a Government of India Undertaking, with headquarters in NOIDA near Delhi. Their annual turnover is about INR 3,500 crores (about US$ 875 million). They have seven major locations other than NOIDA, including four factories spread over northern, central, and western India.

NFL commissioned a project in March 2004 to implement an enterprise- wide WAN to connect all eight locations, integrate their enterprise email management, and implement controlled Web access with reporting and statistics. They also needed a comprehensive firewall solution, including temporary Internet links protected with firewalls for each of the eight locations.

The lead bidder for this project was Technet Software Pvt Ltd, Merce's Premium Solution Partner. Technet and Merce worked jointly to implement the project. The core of the solution was Merce for email, controlled Web access and network monitoring, and Merce Firewalls at all eight locations. The total project was commissioned in less than six months for about 3000 users across all eight locations, including a period of more than three months to commission WAN links connecting all seven remote locations to NFL HQ in NOIDA.

Currently, NFL receives all external email directly into their Internet gateway at NOIDA, and this email is then distributed across the WAN to the mailboxes of recipients all over the enterprise. Web access too passes through the central corporate gateway, and site access is controlled as per Merce access control lists. Virus filtering is implemented at the gateway and at each internal mail server. Anti-spam measures are implemented at the gateway.

In case of a WAN link failure, a remote location can connect to NFL HQ over the Internet by using a VPN link through the Merce Firewalls. This keeps alive the flow of messages and provides resiliency to the NFL WAN.

One engineer sitting at the corporate HQ manages the entire enterprise infrastructure, including eight Merce servers, eight firewalls, one corporate Internet gateway. All user account creation is centrally managed at the HQ.

NFL has seen one or two virus outbreaks at the desktop level since the deployment of the Merce based solution. These have been contained by identifying worm-generated traffic by monitoring logs at the Merce servers. This has helped in identifying the infected PCs and worm propagation has been rapidly contained. In all cases, the Merce servers themselves have been immune to infection because of the security of Merce and the underlying hardened OS.