Implementing Forcepoint solutions led to tangible outcomes.

Overview

Comdata Group is an innovative global leader in the provision of tied management services to the interaction with the customer, following an exclusive Customer Interaction and Process Management approach.

Since 1987 the company has been helping clientele maximize customer value, combining an international footprint with solid local experience through a team of more than 50,000 passionate employees who work speaking 30 languages on four continents and 22 countries.

The company provides a full range of Customer Interaction and Process Management services, from outsourcing of interactions and processes with customers to consulting in customer experience, realizing everything through an effective mix of people, processes, and technology.

Comdata Group, based in Milan, has a proforma turnover of around €1 billion with more than 670 customers, including some of the most important names in telecommunications, energy, banking, industry, retail, and ecommerce.

The Partner

In the process of experimentation with and implementation of Forcepoint solutions, Comdata has been joined by Core Informatica, specializing in consultancy services and technical support to companies of all sizes and a certified partner to Forcepoint. The company Piedmontese still supports Comdata in the development and management of safety systems, putting to good use their skills in the provision of advice, services, and technologies for IT infrastructures.

Challenge

Facing a strong expansion abroad through acquisitions, the theme of protecting sensitive and critical data quickly became a primary element of importance: “The awareness of the relevance of the problem was already present,” recalls Luca Berlinghieri, head of Infrastructure & Service Management of Comdata, “and a few years ago we made the decision to concentrate our attention on the most valuable layer of our information—that related to the strategic plans, economics, or synthesis of production trends.”

“Typically, it is the data most frequently accessed by top and middle management, and it is towards them that we have turned our intent to increase the level of protection, through tools that preserve the freedom to work in every place and context, while at the same time improving safety and prevention.”

On this basis, a process of gradual renewal of security tools has taken shape, especially in the direction of web browsing and, later, of email. From the annual risk assessment activity on company data, Comdata has gained the awareness of having to overcome the pre-existing open source solutions, onerous in terms of maintenance and dedicated resources, to make room for technologies able to guarantee greater automation and continuous evolution.

Solution

Among the defined criteria, it was important that the solutions would be able to respond in a timely fashion to continually evolving threats and, secondly, with the cloud component, also be able to guarantee protection on the mobility front: “Equally important were the international breadth of the supplier and the presence of a community useful for the comparison of experiences,” continues Berlinghieri. “Forcepoint proved to be the ideal partner for almost total adherence to ours needs. We were also impressed by the extreme speed of installation and commissioning work.”

The initial implementation of Forcepoint Web Security followed that of Forcepoint Email Security, while more recently those solutions have been enriched with Forcepoint DLP Discover, in order to ensure more accurate data protection wherever users are, to better meet the needs of managers, as more and more are working on-the-move or from home.

The need to protect the work of their managers and to guarantee effective and adequate access to critical data makes it necessary for Comdata to always consider the human factor. In particular, it must be able to guarantee its own protection in the delicate moment of access to information. “The Forcepoint Human Point System,” continues Berlinghieri, “is definitely the approach that most overlaps our vision and offers a solution to our needs of following management in their movements and offering maximum operational flexibility.”

Results

Implementing Forcepoint solutions led to tangible outcomes. The technologies adopted today cover the security needs of around 1,500 users, which belong to the company’s staff functions.

“In the current phase of development within our company, it is essential for us to focus on what we must protect and not how to do it. We measure each month how many threats are intercepted, and we can say that the solution intercepts threats at 99.99%. Basically, Forcepoint has become one of the primary keys to protecting sensitive data, so we can take care of making the company work.”

Now that protection of cloud and mobile systems is completed, it is foreseeable that there may be an evolution in the direction of predictive analysis, which will follow the transformation path in progress: “It is interesting to understand how information moves and what it does, but also how to help managers prevent the risk of compromising strategic data, not only with technologies, but also with appropriate training and awareness-raising work,” concludes Berlinghieri.