How a leading global solutions provider improves security for its clients.

Headquarters: Mumbai, India

Users: 3200

Objective: Establish consistent security coverage across a distributed global organization that continues to expand and mobilize workforce.

Solution: Cisco Umbrella

Impact:

Bolstered protection against phishing, malware, ransomware, and command and control call backs.
Secured users working off-network.
Reduced security management time over previous solution.
Increased visibility of users, data and apps across the network.
Seamless deployment with no performance issues.

Review

“We ruled out Zscaler due to its overly complex architecture and PAC file requirements. The ongoing management would have been a nightmare.”

“Proxies add latency and cloud-based proxies are subject to outages. Umbrella, which is DNS-based, with an intelligent proxy just performs as promised—no delays, no outages, no impact at all to users.”

‘’Cisco Umbrella delivered the right combination of security, functionality and economy.’’

“After we installed Umbrella, we saw a huge improvement in performance. For example, App response times improved up to 50 percent.”

Protecting a distributed network with minimum overhead

A global procurement and supply chain consulting powerhouse? Leader in direct and indirect procurement software? Best-of-breed provider of managed procurement services? Fact is, we are all of these and more. GEP offers the perfect blend of strategic and advisory services, pace-setting technology and managed services, with a laser focus on procurement and supply chain transformation to help clients achieve their business goals.

Owing to cumbersome operation and deployment of the proxy solution along with its bandwidth limitation which caused degradation in user experience. Also cloud applications have brought added efficiencies to the collaborative process, securing that collaboration began to create inefficiencies across GEP distributed network.

GEP wanted a solution to simply its process yet secure all of
our devices whether in use on-site or working off-network without compromising on the efficacy of security aspect of the solution.

The Solution

To proxy or not to proxy

With 3200 employees spread across Asia, Europe and America, GEP decided to strengthen its security stack with an additional layer of security and evaluated Cisco Umbrella.

“Given an extensively distributed organization, the ability to proactively block threats at the DNS lookup level, without physically adding personnel or hardware at our many worldwide locations, is extremely valuable to us. We also wanted to reduce latency on our network. We liked that Umbrella’s intelligent proxy would give us granular protection without the performance impact of a proxy,” says Sagar.

Sagar continued: “Since Umbrella proxies only requests for risky domains, it does not add the latency and complexity that weighs down proxies. The quality of internet connections in the different countries where we have employees can be inconsistent, so we don’t want to negatively impact that experience.” GEP recognized that migrating from Zscaler to Umbrella would give them capabilities they didn’t have before.

“Umbrella was a powerful additional layer to fortify the defense of our corporate offices, manufacturing facilities, and data centers. We were also able to extend off network protection for employees by enabling the Umbrella roaming security module” says Sagar.

The Result

Easily implemented global protection

“Our Umbrella deployment was so refreshingly smooth that none of our 3200 users commented on it,” says Sagar. “In minutes and with no impact to performance, the entire network gained always-on security that works no matter where a device is located or how it accesses the internet. And, we can now rapidly pinpoint issues by device so we can respond faster.” Sagar considers this visibility among the chief benefits of migrating from Zscaler to Umbrella. “Umbrella immediately alerted us to infections in different countries that previously went undetected by our malware solution, and we’ve noticed a dramatic drop in command & control callback traffic.” Sagar, meanwhile, sees other advantages. “Umbrella secures access to the cloud and makes it possible for us to enhance the user experience.” GEP has also gained back time that was previously spent on maintaining their Zscaler solution. “We’ve met our goal of recovering time previously spent on Zscaler administration” says Sagar, “and Umbrella’s easy-to-use interface has helped us realize additional administrative time savings.”

How a leading global solutions provider improves security for its clients.