Swiss Life

Overview

Swiss Life has been invested in the financial security of its customers since 1857. A leading provider of insurance and wealth management, Swiss Life manages close to £62B ($64.7B) of assets throughout 12 countries. Teams are located in Switzerland, Germany, France and Luxembourg. Swiss Life France is well positioned as the organization’s largest subsidiary with 2,750 employees as of early 2016.

Challenge

In 2009, Swiss Life France recognized a key challenge which had been impacting the company as well as several of its peers. Zero-day malware and advanced persistent threats, such as ransomware and rootkits, were infiltrating its network undetected. As a result, Swiss Life recognized that it needed to optimize and better secure the infiltration and exfiltration of its data. In addition, Swiss Life’s sales representatives working remotely (approximately 1,400 in total) are equipped with laptops and Windows tablets. These devices are frequently connected to unsecured external networks and must be equipped with the same level of protection as if connected to the corporate network.

“Employers are becoming more and more flexible with who is accessing their internet and how it’s being used. It is Swiss Life’s responsibility to accurately define access that is flexible while still in line with the recommendations of our IT security officer.”
— Jérôme Blanche-Barbat, Operational Security Engineer, Swiss Life

Solution

For Swiss Life France, the evaluation process for an efficient, best in-class security solution began in 2009. After an audit of its systems and a successful proof of concept for functionality, Swiss Life chose Forcepoint Web Security as its comprehensive real-time, inline solution to protect against advanced, non-signature threats. Swiss Life made the decision to purchase Forcepoint Web Security deployed in a hybrid environment.

The hybrid architecture draws from highly-secured, industry leading cloud capabilities and a deep expertise in on-premises platforms to deliver unified web security that’s built to evolve as Swiss Life’s IT environment does.

“We have reached a level of maturity in our hybrid protection such that interruptions to our web security are no longer problems. We are now flexible in all future deployments which has led to us being able to quickly implement and customize our security whenever we need to.”
— Blanche-Barbat

Accompanied by partner and integrator Yourax since 2011, Forcepoint has been able to aggregate Swiss Life’s infrastructure with Microsoft’s Active Directory to efficiently manage user groups and SIEM (security information and event management) software.

“All parts of the puzzle are perfectly integrated with one another so that accessing solution remains simple while providing effective results. We trust the solution to stick with the dynamism of our activities.”
— Blanche-Barbat

Results

Forcepoint Web Security has ensured the regulation and security of Swiss Life’s flow of data. Whether connected to a hotel’s wireless network or from home, the Swiss Life sales team is able to avoid malicious attacks that may divert or modify sensitive information.

“With Forcepoint Web Security, we are preventing the spread of malicious software, ransomware attacks and other rootkits that are attempting to connect to terminals via our corporate network or via an external network. We are confident that each user is protected from anything that is seen as a potential threat during his/her work session on the Internet.”
— Blanche-Barbat

Choosing to deploy Forcepoint Web Security in a hybrid environment continues to provide high-performance security that’s as reliable as it is flexible for Swiss Life.

Swiss Life has relied on Forcepoint security solutions since 2009.