Simplicity Credit Union is able to eliminate the extra cost and duplicated work of other hybrid deployments that have separate management systems.

Overview

Simplicity Credit Union is a not-for-profit financial cooperative based out of Marshfield, Wisconsin. Dedicated to helping its members pursue and achieve their financial goals, Simplicity Credit Union is continuously adapting to their needs. Simplicity Credit Union serves over 23,000 members and has assets of more than $225 million.

Challenge

Protecting member data › Thomas Frank, System Administrator at Simplicity Credit Union, states that protecting member data will always be the organization’s top priority. With 7 locations and a small IT team, Simplicity Credit Union sees it critical to have a security solution in place which unifies operations and allows complete visibility to crucial points of the system in a hybrid environment.

“The success of my role is determined by the timely completion of projects, keeping expenses within budget, providing fast support to our employees, and most importantly, protecting the data of our members.”
— Frank

Solution

Forcepoint prevents a large scale data breach › On-premises email security was already being regulated by Forcepoint Email Security at the time Frank joined the organization. In fact, it had been protecting member personal identifiable information (PII) so well that it had, on one occasion, prevented a catastrophic data breach.

Forcepoint Email Security was able to catch malicious emails, posing as a well-known e-signature application, before reaching Simplicity Credit Union’s end-users. Forcepoint Email Security flagged fraudulent emails that resembled the application’s domain name, but would later be traced to a different IP address. While several surrounding nancial organizations were breached by the attack, Simplicity Credit Union remained un-affected.

Expanding its security portfolio › When it was time to expand its security portfolio to web and data protection, Simplicity Credit Union did its due diligence and evaluated multiple security vendors on the market. Few vendors, as Frank recalls, were offering an “all-in-one” solution. The ones that did, came with too many devices that Frank felt would have complicated the system’s management.

“We always knew we could build a future with Forcepoint. Already having Forcepoint Email Security in place made it easier to realize that. There wasn’t an all-in-one solution we evaluated that provided the same capabilities. Forcepoint being a leader in the security division was also a driving factor to our decision.”
— Frank

A hybrid environment was essential to the organization’s success › Unified management and reporting was a necessity for Frank and his IT team. By deploying Forcepoint in a hybrid environment, Simplicity Credit Union is able to eliminate the extra cost and duplicated work of other hybrid deployments that have separate management systems. This consolidates management of cloud services and on-premises solution in a single console with one visibility, policy and reporting system.

“The cloud environment with Office 365 can sometimes hinder our exchange servers; it’s a nightmare to manage. Forcepoint gives us more flexibility in how we manage cloud services on or off our network.”
— Frank

Results

Protecting the human point › Since deploying Forcepoint solutions, Frank has been asked by his organization to present on the subject of “the human point” to his end-users, in order to build a fundamentally secure IT environment. It’s something Frank says he notes as an invaluable point of ROI from the Forcepoint solution.

“There’s so much ROI here. Number one, we’re saving people time, saving our IT staff time. Second, and most importantly, we’re preventing end-users from accidentally sending out PII, which now gets flagged so they know to resend as encrypted. Forcepoint’s solutions protect users from themselves, and in the end, helps to protect member data.”
— Frank

Evolving an IT environment to lead the way for groundbreaking innovation › Forcepoint’s hybrid architecture draws from highly-secured, industry-leading cloud capabilities and a deep expertise in on-premises platforms to deliver unified web and email security that will evolve simultaneously with Simplicity Credit Union’s IT environment. According to Frank, Forcepoint saves his organization hours out the day, which he acknowledges will help Simplicity Credit Union innovate for the future.