By Amit Sharon, Head of Global Customer Community & Market Intelligence, Check Point

Read how a leading manufacturer of rubber products for industries worldwide gained complete protection for its public cloud SaaS applications and endpoints.

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Midwest Rubber operates in three continents and serves customers worldwide. I met with Brandon Pelinka, I.T. Manager, Midwest Rubber Service & Supply Company, to learn how this manufacturer protects its endpoints and public cloud SaaS applications that power its business, while meeting distinct compliance needs across its global manufacturing sites.

Since 1976, Midwest Rubber Service & Supply Company has been fabricating, and distributing high quality rubber products. This innovative manufacturer relies on cloud-based SaaS applications, including Microsoft Office 365, to stay agile and keep costs in line. The company needed a security solution that could provide protection for employees’ SaaS accounts and stop phishing, malware, and other threats at their endpoint devices.

Amit Sharon:  Why is security so important to Midwest Rubber, and how do your needs differ at your manufacturing sites across the globe?

Brandon Pelinka: Public cloud SaaS applications are key to our business. We’re using Microsoft Office 365 applications to help users stay productive, as well as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central cloud ERP. Our servers reside on Microsoft Azure, and we also support our multinational operations on a Citrix digital workspace environment. With so much data moving between sites, endpoints, and in the cloud, maintaining pervasive security is a top business imperative for us. We strive to protect our customers’ data, our proprietary data, and all of our research. Since we are global, our compliance needs vary. We have sites in China, which has its own distinct requirements, as well as in the Netherlands, with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance concerns that we have to follow.

Amit Sharon:  How do you apply protection to all these diverse SaaS apps, in a way that keeps your environments protected and compliant with local needs?

Brandon Pelinka: We looked at a lot of different options, and chose Check Point CloudGuard SaaS, a cloud service that blocks attacks intended to steal data on SaaS applications and cloud email. It gives us not only deep visibility, but complete protection against malware and zero-days, sophisticated phishing attacks, as well as hijacking of employee SaaS accounts. Plus it blocks cybercriminals from taking over our employees’ SaaS accounts with Identity Protection technology. We have had no viruses or other security issues since we’ve implemented it.

Amit Sharon: Your organization has a lot of diverse endpoint devices. How do you protect end users from threats that could get into the network and multiply?

Brandon Pelinka: We use Check Point SandBlast Agent to defend against zero-day and targeted threats at our endpoints. If a user goes to download any malicious document, or a document that they think is not malicious, it downloads it and extracts it in the cloud without requiring the user to do it. If the file is malicious, SandBlast Agent will scrub it and send down a clean version. It’s great to have another layer of security protection for our endpoints. The Zero Trust capability has also been really huge. When our users are on any Web site and they go to put their credentials in, the phishing capability of SandBlast Agent checks and scans the username and password to make sure that it’s not a malicious site, and help ensure they don’t put corporate credentials in. That’s important for us, because a lot of our users tend to reuse passwords on multiple sites.

Amit Sharon: What about protecting your global sites? How do you handle regional security requirements?

Brandon Pelinka:  For global compliance, we added Check Point Full Disk Encryption (FDE), which delivers transparent security for all information on all our endpoint drives, including user data, operating system files, and even temporary and erased files. Having Check Point’s full disk encryption and being able to essentially manage it from one spot made me feel confident about ensuring that all of our devices, including mobile devices, were GDPR and PCI compliant. It checks all the security boxes that are required for regional compliance.

Read the full story at https://www.checkpoint.com/customer-stories/midwest-rubber/.

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