National Cancer Institute of Italy

Overview

Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori (INT) is the center for international excellence in research, treatment and prevention of oncological diseases. Established in 1928, INT engages in biomedical research, the training and qualification of human resources, innovation in organization, and the management of health services. The institute is the largest center for pediatric oncology in Italy and the second largest in Europe.

Challenge

The idea for adopting a new security solution arose because INT was spending a large majority of its time completing security-related tasks manually. It also required flexible protection against all risks and malicious software. These are classic security issues for both private and public companies, and these issues will always need to be approached by management in the most innovative way. For INT, threat protection is an essential aspect of that challenge.

“The aim was to adopt a platform that could protect browsing on the move. Above all, we need threat protection.”
— Marco Bellazzi, Service Manager, Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori

Bellazzi mentioned “browsing on the move” as his security platform requirement. At its core, this is protecting a mobile workforce on all endpoints. Mobile employees are going to leave the on-premises network at some point. Knowing that, it is crucial for any company to keep its same protocols unified across all endpoints, onpremises or remote.

Solution

The Forcepoint solution, because of its great capacity for categorization of content, sites and domains, was the ideal platform for solving all problems in real-time and in a single console. After the selection process between vendors and solutions, the choice for INT was to take advantage of the Forcepoint Web Security.

“The previous system allowed only a very static filtering. The new solution instead performs automatically and continuously refreshes site categorization and the dynamic management of web pages authorized.”
— Bellazzi

Results

The benefits were immediate. Employees struggled to perceive an immediate payback of the work done in the background from the solution, but instantly recognized the greater fluidity of navigating online. In this sense, the management of bandwidth with the new solution is completely rationalized. INT researchers, connected to a series of external sites, as well as all other employees, are taking full advantage of lower latency, increased browsing speed and safe, protected data download. The solution has also helped reduce the number of help desk calls related to the performance online, freeing staff from performing a series of repetitive tasks

When asked if these results correlate to lower costs for the foundation:

“Let’s just say that it is not always possible to quantify them. The solution has, without a doubt, however, proven a better use of resources. We know that when you limit the freedom of online navigation, people do not respond enthusiastically. When, however, it is understood that a platform is implemented to improve the company security, in the end, all employees are willing to accept the advantages of being able to navigate on secure web pages.”
— Bellazzi

INT is using Forcepoint as a platform for managing productivity and threat protection for on-premises and mobile employees. Overall, threat defence and online navigation is more fluid and business continuity is at its best.

Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori has relied on Forcepoint security solutions since 2010.