Be Careful What You Wish For (the Move to Cloud-Based Email)

Business challenge

IT and business leadership had long wished to be rid of the need to manage email from the datacenter. This would mean no more servers, SANs, firewalls, or virus software to manage and maintain. It was assumed that the cloud provider would take on the responsibility for infrastructure and security; however, it seemed that more spam, phishing, malware, and anomalous activities occurred after the move to cloud. After a year of dealing with these new problems, the cloud provider offered an increased level of security, which came with increased cost. In spite of increasing the security, spam, phishing, malware, and anomalous activities continued. The next response was to ratchet up the security to an even higher level. The result this time created numerous false positives. This, in turn, impacted users and helpdesk.

Solution

Six Degrees Consulting provided the customer with a demo and trial of Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration (HEC). We were able to build a detailed report of the spam, phishing, malware, and anomalous activities that the cloud provider was delivering to the inbox. The customer decided to extend the trial’s scope to include a small group of highly targeted users in an inline protection policy. The resulting low false-negative and -positive statistics got management’s attention. The company was able to fund the unplanned rollout of Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration with significant savings. Savings included lowering the security level of the cloud provider, decreasing IT time as a result of automation, decreasing time wasted by users, lowering the risks of executed phishing and malware attacks.

When the customer decided to move forward with Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration, the results were excellent, although they were unsurprising given the beforehand prep. Moving from trial to production was low effort since most of the workflow had been defined for the group of highly targeted users that tested the inline functionality. The rest of the work was provided by the Check Point onboarding team. All Harmony Email & Collaboration installations include onboarding as part of the subscription cost.

The solution included Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration

Solutions, services, and products applied

Email and Cloud Collaboration Security: Harmony Email & Collaboration