Clearly defined needs

Arnaud Le Bihan, Networks and Systems Administrator of Serap Industries was planning to migrate the company’s entire antimalware infrastructure in the summer of 2014. The previous solution, which was in use for more than 20 years, was no longer satisfactory, due in part to its huge signature files and subpar real-time detection.

“Over the years, it became difficult to work with our old solution. It had become too heavy,” states Arnaud Le Bihan. “It was imperative to use a vendor more suited to our changing needs. The priority was to improve security on mobile workstations, including application control. It was also critical to oversee the entire patch management process for non-Microsoft products – Java and Adobe products coming to mind in this case!”

To help with the task of searching for a new solution, Arnaud Le Bihan consulted his IT partners, including Mismo and Bechtle. Analyst reports and benchmarking organizations such as AVTest also provided important guidelines in shortlisting vendors. Two proof-of-concepts from WithSecure were selected and quickly implemented.

The requirements were as follows:

• Full set of features (anti-spam, firewall and application control, patch management, URL filtering, VM agent, etc.)
• After-sales support in French
• European vendor

“For Serap Industries, the solution had to be effective and proactive, and had to cover both stationary and mobile workstations. Patch management truly was the decisive factor. We understand the importance of having constantly up-to-date devices, but we know that not everyone remembers to keep all of their applications updated. This was a critical element in our decision.”

This is in fact the element that ruled out the competing vendor: their proposed solution did not include patch management or centralized application control, which are both included in WithSecure Policy Manager.

Installation fully completed by WithSecure France

Deployment of WithSecure solutions began in November of the same year. WithSecure MSG was deployed first, to manage the anti-spam functionality (see below). Email processing for the beginning of 2016 reveals that about 23% of emails are now blocked by MSG, as they are considered spam or otherwise.

Policy Manager Console and SRS servers were then installed to streamline virtual environments. After that, 4 workstations received Client Security for a one-week evaluation. Full deployment resumed on all workstations using Policy Manager Console. Deployment on servers was performed manually during weekends.

The Policy Manager Console statistics speak for themselves. Peaks are reported in May, August, and at the end of the year. The most important occurred in October, with 275 infections blocked across 180 workstations and servers.

After deployment

Uninstallation of the previous solution was automatically done, and deployment of the new solution was fully completed before 2015. The same year, Client Security Premium was updated, and WithSecure Messaging Gateway was upgraded. More than 180 workstations and more than a dozen servers globally are now protected by WithSecure.

 “We are very happy with our partnership with WithSecure: discussing with their teams on how to continue improving our partnership is easy and pleasant! We are still following product news and looking into adding new features regularly. For instance, we are now beginning to address mobile security.”

Arnaud Le Bihan, Networks and Systems Administrator, Serap Industries