Two decades of cooperation with scalable IT security solutions

The client

The company known today as Techwave, which focuses primarily on SAP implementation, consulting and support, started in 1999 under the name Hostlogic Kft., then an American-Swiss owned company. It came into Hungarian ownership in 2001. The company has been implementing SAP from the very beginning, complemented by SAP hosting, which was unique at the time. They started with a template-based product that cut the two-year implementation period to six months. Today this interval has stretched to one to one and a half years, due to the diversity of companies’ needs and the complexity of the systems. They now have close to 150 clients in Hungary and internationally.

The IT leader

Gábor Lesti joined the company in 2000 as an engineer, when he still handled infrastructure-related tasks. Even then they sold the products of the best companies on the market to their clients, in which Gábor played a significant role. With the introduction of new services he moved closer to the world of SAP Basis, and as the team grew he was the first to be appointed team leader. In 2015 he became Head of IT and thus one of the company’s six directors, a role he holds to this day. Since then the team reporting to him has been segmented: today there are separate teams for SAP Basis, local IT, IT security and Linux, as well as Windows and VMware.

When stability matters

The cooperation between Andrews and Techwave goes back to 2005. Before the partnership, Techwave used an Israeli firewall solution, but that company went out of business and no updates were coming, so they had to look for another provider. One of Techwave’s clients then recommended Andrews based on their own experience. Andrews introduced its firewall solution in both of their data centres, and these have been working smoothly ever since.

For Techwave, reliability, honesty, thinking together and professional excellence are indispensable in external providers too, so their cooperation of more than 20 years validates the competences of Andrews all the more.

Scalable protection, a partnership that keeps pace

One of the great milestones of the joint work was when they introduced a redundant firewall setup together in Techwave’s data centre. Later, as the number of spam messages grew, the need for the MSA mail filter arose as well, which they started using around 2015. Thanks to the filtering of incoming mail, the colleagues are spared junk mail while also protecting themselves from ransomware. The MSA mail filter was later extended to outgoing mail as well.

Since 2022 they have also been using the SOC and WAF services of Andrews. For the SOC they started with a smaller package, analysing only the firewall logs at first, but by now this has been extended with the log analysis of further servers.

Naturally, as Techwave’s portfolio grew, so did its monthly costs towards Andrews, but according to Gábor Lesti the high level of security and service they receive is worth every penny. He pointed out that the Andrews services are flexible and their solutions scalable, built so that they can do their job anywhere on a scale from 1 to 100. This is a huge help for Techwave, because they could work with Andrews when they still had 2 clients and 100 users, and they still can now, with 100+ clients and 30,000 users.

Seeing ahead what others are not even looking for

Andrews always takes a proactive approach to the cooperation, so whenever they see an opportunity to make Techwave’s system more secure and efficient, they flag it to the team. Being approached with these innovations has proved a great help for them. Moreover, what they recommended always stayed grounded in reality.