ACH Group Delivers a Seamless and Secure Journey to the Cloud

“We have a number of core security fundamentals tied to our zero-trust goal,” says Loveday. “The web plane is one of the most important given that our staff need to be able to work from any one of our 15 locations as well as from home, an increasingly important requirement in the age of COVID-19.”

The company’s legacy antivirus and web filtering solution had reached the end of its life. The web filter agent resided on users’ workstations and slowed performance. As Loveday puts it: “We were burdened with a burning web security platform. We saw this as the perfect opportunity to future-proof our web security plane.”

As part of its web gateway, ACH Group also benefits from the Netskope cloud access security broker (CASB), which enables the organization to quickly identify and manage the use of cloud applications. ACH Group is also using the Netskope data loss prevention (DLP) capability, which helps prevent data loss, exfiltration, and inadvertent public exposure for cloud-based data.

In addition to these expected benefits, ACH Group is experiencing a number of surprises. “What impressed me most was a feature we didn’t initially have in scope: DLP,” says Loveday. “With Netskope we’re seeing a paradigm shift in terms of DLP usability. We simply turn on the tool, watch the traffic, and adjust where needed. The system automatically suggests data to protect, meaning we can get on with defining alerts and policies rather than categorizing data.”

Netskope is central to ACH Group’s virtual working model. Loveday says: “Microsoft 365 is our key collaboration tool. Netskope accelerated our migration to SharePoint by helping us to manage the security of Microsoft 365 in a highly granular way. With Netskope in place, we can rest easy that the web plane is secure. What’s more, it’s frictionless to the workforce—there’s no impact to the business operations.”

Another benefit to ACH Group is better visibility and control. “We have an acceptable use policy for personal apps,” says Loveday. “Netskope helps stop this ‘shadow IT’ footprint from growing out of control. We can also enhance security through automated alerts whenever a user sends corporate IP to a personal storage app.”