Forcepoint CASB has helped MLI gain complete visibility and control over all its Office 365 application usage.

Overview

Max Life Insurance is one of the leading life insurers in India. Founded in the year 2000, the company offers comprehensive long-term savings, protection and retirement solutions through its agency distribution and multi-channel distribution partners.

Challenges

Securing Cloud Data on Office 365 - When Max Life Insurance (MLI) adopted Microsoft Office 365 to boost collaboration and productivity among its 10,000-strong workforce across 210 offices, its primary concern was protecting cloud data and ensuring secure access to it. From a compliance standpoint, it also needed to secure cloud data end-to-end—from the cloud to the point of consumption on both managed and unmanaged devices.

“While embracing cloud to leverage greater efficiency and productivity, we are also committed to securely enabling our Office 365 application to protect all our customers’ data and ensuring compliance to regulatory requirements.”
— Ritesh Mishra, AVP – IT, Max Life Insurance

Need for Visibility and Control - With data stored on OneDrive and exchanged over email, as well as with file sharing through SharePoint and video collaboration over Skype, the company has a lot of critical data on its Office 365 cloud application. This raised the challenge of monitoring who was accessing what data on Office 365 and stopping bad actors from accessing that data.

MLI needed a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solution that would understand what sensitive data is being processed and stored in Office 365, provide visibility into cloud app account usage, and control Office 365 data and application access by both employees and business partners from managed and unmanaged devices.

In addition to visibility and control, the company wanted the CASB solution to address other key requirements such as data leakage prevention, cloud encryption, mobile data protection, identity management and threat, and malware detection on the Office 365 application.

Solution

Keeping these requirements in mind, Mishra evaluated various Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solutions available in the market. Forcepoint CASB made an impression, edging past competition for a number of reasons:

• The ability to seamlessly integrate with the company’s existing Airwatch MDM solution
• Support offerings for all mobile operating systems

Forcepoint also had an advantage with its DLP solution already deployed at MLI, making it easier to integrate it with its CASB solution. What also differentiated Forcepoint from other vendors was its readiness to do the implementation in an in-line mode from Day 1.

According to Mishra, besides all these factors, Forcepoint’s after-sales support credentials as well as the close involvement of the company’s top management provided the much-needed confidence in moving forward with Forcepoint CASB.

After gathering all the requirements and performing a thorough evaluation of the company’s IT architecture, deployment was smoothly carried out by Forcepoint implementation partner ACPL.

Results

Since its deployment, Forcepoint CASB has helped MLI gain complete visibility and control over all its Office 365 application usage.

“We are able to fully leverage the potential of Office 365 while meeting regulatory compliance, knowing that our data is secure in the cloud application with the visibility and control provided by Forcepoint CASB.”
— Mishra

The solution enables real-time activity monitoring and analytics with the help of a dashboard that provides a comprehensive and consolidated view of activity and transaction logging. This helps identify potential exposure by user, group, location, device, application action, etc. The system correlates user activity and proactively responds to any suspicious and anomalous activity that could indicate a threat.

With strong data access controls on both managed and unmanaged devices, Forcepoint CASB is helping MLI protect critical data on its Office 365 application. The solution enables different levels of access to the application based on user/ groups, managed versus unmanaged devices, geographic location, IP range, and access method (web, client apps, mail client, mobile, etc.). Access can be blocked to the applications, users, or devices that present a business risk.

Forcepoint DLP integration into the CASB solution also helps prevent cloud application data leakage without redefining policies. Going forward, MLI will be able to leverage the Forcepoint CASB solution to secure access to other cloud applications it plans to add in the future.