CensorNet

DTU, one of the leading technical universities in Europe, faced the challenge of providing secure access to a wide range of systems and applications for its 1400 employees. The university's IT service function serves a wide range of departments, university entities, and affiliated companies who benefit from their modern IT setup and infrastructure. Employee remote access from across Europe is enabled through a number of login systems including Citrix, Cisco, and SSH. Initially, users accessing these systems were required to carry around hardware tokens for authentication when logging in. However, the token-based setup was becoming increasingly time-consuming to manage and was causing frustration for both users and the IT team managing the solution.

Thatchers, a cidermaker based in Somerset, has been growing significantly over the last ten years and had outgrown many of its systems and applications. As a result, it had become much more vulnerable to security breaches. With more and more sophisticated threats, Thatchers looked to reduce their risk of being attacked. Senior IT Engineer, Hamish Ross and his team were keen to prevent Thatchers falling victim. They urgently needed to lock down their systems and prevent an attack. First on Thatchers’ priority list was an email filtering system that was straightforward to manage, could scale easily as the business continues to grow and could protect the business from malicious emails that could have viruses attached or links to infected sites.

Veramed, a contract research organisation in the pharmaceutical industry, faced a challenge in monitoring and protecting its staff in a cloud-only business environment. The company had never had on-premise servers or traditional perimeter security, making it difficult to keep staff safe from malware and inappropriate sites. As the company continued to grow, it needed to formalise its security to reassure customers that it was operating in line with stringent standards, such as ISO 271001. Veramed needed to improve its monitoring capabilities by strengthening its awareness of staff behaviour, enabling it to address any issues and provide users with education on safe, secure IT usage.

The National Portrait Gallery, one of Britain’s best-loved museums, was seeking to improve its security posture and achieve the government’s Cyber Essentials security standard. The Gallery has a high public profile and receives funding from the government, public donations, and receipts from ticketed exhibitions, gift shop sales, and events. As the Gallery’s existing security contracts came to an end, Nicky Dowland, Head of Information Technology, sought a more advanced solution that would provide additional layers of security on a platform that was easy for a small IT team to manage, and that could help it achieve the Cyber Essentials security standard.

Radius Payment Solutions is a global business-to-business services company providing fuel cards, electric vehicle charge points, vehicle tracking, telecoms and insurance. The company operates worldwide and has a turnover of over £2.5 billion. As an ISO27001 accredited and Cyber Essentials Plus certified business, the highest levels of security are vital to protect its customers’ information – as much of it is financial and therefore sensitive. With content being shared across the globe, it’s essential that the company’s IT teams have visibility and control over where data is stored and what information leaves the business. Radius was looking for a platform that would provide the protection and control they needed and with additional functionality. However, more importantly, they were looking for a solution that met both the technical requirements of the business and was provided by a partner with whom Radius had confidence in building a long-term strategic relationship.

Samuel Simmonds Memorial Hospital (SSMH) is located in a remote location in Barrow, on Alaska’s North Slope, 360 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The hospital was constructed in 1963 to provide a critical access facility to residents of an area larger than the state of Washington. The hospital's prime objective has been to provide culturally sensitive quality healthcare for the communities of the Arctic Slope. The rebuilding of the hospital provided the perfect opportunity to update technical equipment. The challenge was to provide effective web filtering in this remote location to ensure that the hospital complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This protects the privacy and security of health information, in order to guarantee patient and staff confidentiality. The remote location of the hospital had placed a greater than normal temptation to use the internet for non work-related activities.

The Disabilities Trust, a UK-based charity, was facing significant insider threats and the growing risk of ransomware attacks. It needed a total overhaul of its web and cloud application security to protect staff and patients alike. The organization's user activity and privacy controls needed significant attention. The biggest threat was the insider threat – inside out, not outside in. Whether that’s leavers exfiltrating the organization's IP or confidential patient information being unwittingly shared on public forums, the impact could be critical – both reputationally, and for the people they support.

Onecom, the UK’s largest independent business telecommunications provider, needed a centralised security platform that could protect its 400+ employees outside of the traditional workplace perimeter, while minimising demand for internal IT resources. The company was looking to grow rapidly in the next three to five years, so having a security solution that could scale alongside the company was very important. Onecom was particularly looking to protect employees from email attacks, such as phishing, and threats over the web, as well as save the IT team time and resources when it came to implementing security solutions alongside maintaining the highest levels of compliance.

Produce World, a major supplier of fresh vegetables in Europe, operates across multiple sites and relies heavily on remote working. With employees needing access to company systems from various locations, including farms, customer premises, and home, the company faced a significant challenge in ensuring secure and convenient access. The rise in security threats, particularly phishing, necessitated a robust solution. The company had been using a hardware token-based two-factor authentication system, but recognized the vulnerabilities associated with relying solely on usernames and passwords.

Alternative Solutions, a leading IT services company, was looking to streamline their product portfolio and displace legacy solutions with one cyber security platform that could deliver full-service cyber security across all core threat vectors for its customers and help them meet their regulatory requirements. The company also wanted to find a security vendor who could help them move away from perpetual license-based products due to demand from customers for consumption-based billing. The company had previously resold separate security products for email, web and cloud security from multiple vendors. The ideal scenario for them was a cloud product that provided integrated security across these channels for their customers.

St Anne’s Community Services, a not-for-profit organization that provides support to those in need across the North of England, faced the challenge of protecting highly sensitive data. The challenge of protecting confidential information has increased in recent years due to more stringent data privacy regulation through the GDPR, while digital transformation increases the volume and vulnerability of data. Visibility of where data is stored, and control over who has access to it and has the ability to share it is vital in this day and age. With St Anne’s already well on the way in its cloud transformation journey, having migrated to Microsoft Azure and Office 365, the charity needed an additional layer of security on top of what was provided as standard by its cloud services.

Tangerine Confectionery, the UK’s largest own-label sweet manufacturer, was looking to move away from its legacy web security solution. The company has five sites across the country and employs 1,100 people. The priority for Tangerine was to ensure its employees were protected when browsing the web, both on and off-premise. The company trialled other solutions available in the market but found that they did not have the advanced functionality it was looking for, including the ability to protect employees offsite, and the flexibility to work with their existing IT architecture.

Thumbs Up (Bury) Ltd, a manufacturer and supplier of plastic housewares and storage products, faced a major disruption to their business due to the infection of their computers with the Zeus Trojan. This disruption included downtime of their email system. The infection occurred while the company was in the process of swapping their email system from BTpop to Microsoft Exchange to improve productivity. However, even after the implementation of Microsoft Exchange, email-borne viruses continued to disrupt the business. In addition, about a week after the infection the company’s telephone lines were temporarily hijacked by hackers posing as BT engineers, so that if the bank phoned to verify any transactions the calls could be intercepted by the hackers and it would appear that they were speaking to the company.

Capsticks, a leading national healthcare law firm, had a remote access system in place for its lawyers to log on from home or other remote locations. However, the remote access was only secured with a password. With over two-thirds of security breaches being down to weak or stolen passwords, Capsticks’ IT team were hyper aware of the vulnerability of the firm’s systems. As a law firm, many of the cases they deal with are very sensitive, so the data they store is confidential. They were conscious that where their remote working environment was concerned, their security was only as good as the weakest password used by their employees. They needed to find a solution and quickly. In addition to increased security, it was vital for Capsticks and its team of busy lawyers that the solution was a user-friendly one.

Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), a global leader in container shipping, faced a challenge in securing access for its employees who required off-site use of Citrix published applications, regardless of their location in the world. The company was also transitioning its remote working environment from a VPN solution to Citrix, aiming to provide a more flexible and intuitive operating system for remote workers. However, securing access to this new system was crucial. With the rise in security threats, two in three network breaches involve lost or stolen passwords. MSC was aware of this and wanted to change the domain authentication they were using after a penetration test highlighted the need for maintaining the highest level of security for the business.

Royal Russell School, a coeducational independent day and boarding school based in South London, needed to safeguard its children online. It specifically needed to uphold their data rights in data protection law, as children are classified as vulnerable data subjects. This meant Royal Russell needed an enterprise-class threat detection system to protect its community as they browsed the web and accessed applications in the cloud. With end-of-life web security, it was clear they needed to engage a new solution to protect its large school community of 1,500 users including pupils and staff. They also needed to protect the number one attack surface: email, and effective email filtering was vital.

Forward Financial Bank, a community-focused financial institution, was faced with the challenge of providing their remote employees with secure access to highly sensitive financial data without overburdening their IT department. The bank had previously used a token-based solution, which proved to be expensive, required a lot of management, and was unintuitive for the users. The hardware tokens were difficult to manage and would expire, leading to constant reordering. The bank was in search of a more efficient and user-friendly solution.

Harrowells Solicitors, a regional law firm based in the north of England, needed to develop a more secure environment for remote working. The firm wanted to improve the productivity of its workforce, enable more flexible working arrangements, and allow external partners to connect to its systems. Employees wanted to be able to work from home, or work when they were travelling. They were also using lots of different types of devices – tablets, laptops and smart phones. The nature of the Harrowells business also meant that employees handle very sensitive client information, so data security is of paramount importance. From a mobile working perspective, the requirement was to be able to provide an additional layer of security to the firm’s systems and applications, whilst at the same time enabling employees to work from any location using whatever device they needed to.

Borsen, Denmark’s leading business publisher, had a remote access system in place for its workforce of 230, allowing journalists to work from home and on the move. However, the remote access to systems and applications was only secured with user names and passwords. The IT department was concerned about the vulnerability of the system, knowing that almost two thirds of network breaches involve weak or stolen passwords. The security of the entire system was only as good as the weakest password, which was a significant risk.

Amey, a leading public and regulated services provider in the UK, was working with a government contract customer to provide secure remote access for their staff. This remote access was vital for maintaining workforce productivity levels. However, the existing solution, which used traditional two-factor authentication with a combination of hardware and software tokens, was inconvenient, difficult to use, and expensive to maintain. This hindered user productivity and made their jobs more difficult. Furthermore, with security threats proliferating and almost two-thirds of network breaches involving weak or stolen passwords, there was a need to upgrade the user authentication solution to better protect the remote access environment.

Intility, a managed cloud provider, was facing a challenge with its password policy. The policy required users to frequently change their passwords, which led to users often forgetting their passwords and needing to contact the help desk for assistance. This resulted in a strain on Intility’s helpdesk function, which had to handle a growing number of password-related calls. Additionally, security was a concern as it was difficult to verify the identity of the person requesting the password reset.

Cloetta, a successful confectionery business in Europe, has been utilizing commodity services and applications to reduce its infrastructure footprint and smart-source some business-critical processes. Remote working and cloud services are integral parts of the company's strategy to increase productivity and grow the business. However, the openness of its IT architecture posed a threat to the security of its confidential information. The use of cloud applications and the increase in remote working meant that more employees were using the internet to access services and gather information, which in turn increased the chance of getting infected by malicious applications. Cloetta was also the target for cyber threats that proliferate through the use of email, such as phishing, spam, viruses, and other malware.