Case Study - Ellips

Challenge

Before fruits and vegetables make it to the grocery store, they must go through a rigorous grading – or rating – system based on their appearance and quality. A high-quality grade ultimately means the produce is more expensive to the consumer – resulting in higher profits for food suppliers. Ellips, founded in 1989 and based in the Netherlands, offers this technology to machine builders and farmers worldwide to help streamline the food grading process. With Ellips, it is guaranteed that fruits and vegetables, like apples, cherries, dates, pears, asparagus, onions, and potatoes, end up in the right place and that less food is wasted. The company recently opened a branch in the United States in 2016 to support the increasing demand for this technology.

Network security is a critical component of their service and product offering to ensure their technology remains confidential, protected from security vulnerabilities and most importantly – only accessible by authorized IT staff. This is especially important for their remote employees who need secure access to business-critical resources and valuable company assets.

Another challenge that the company faced was that at one point, Ellips previously had routers at an external location that provided no visibility into the security incidents that were occurring on their network. Because of a lack of visibility, the network became infected with the cryptominer virus, causing slow Internet connection for their users. All of this prompted Ellips to look for a new solution.

Solution

In order to protect the company’s assets, the technology company needed a way to have full transparency of their network traffic. As such, the company chose WatchGuard Technologies because it gave them complete control and visibility of their network. Sander van de Plas, IT manager at Ellips, noted: “Visibility is important. We want to know who has access to our networks, from which location and when. We also wanted to prevent unauthorized access to our network, and WatchGuard easily fits the bill.”

With the help of their partner, COM4 Automation, Ellips deployed WatchGuard Firebox T35, T55, M270, and M470 appliances, to prevent previously mentioned cryptominer virus attacks from happening again. With Total Security Suite, Ellips was able to benefit from the full range of security services including DNSWatch, Application Control and spamBlocker to protect against advanced attacks. Furthermore, Dimension, WatchGuard’s Cloud-ready security visibility solution included with every Firebox, gave them full visibility into the health and insights of their network.

Ellips also needed a way to provide secure network access to its remote employees. Multi-factor authentication provided by AuthPoint was another reason that the technology company chose WatchGuard. “WatchGuard AuthPoint, a Cloud-based solution for multi-factor authentication, was used for employees who travel frequently. In the event of theft or loss of a laptop, we did not want the Ellips software, for example, to be accessible to unauthorized users,” stated Sander.

Results

The implementation of the new WatchGuard solutions went quickly and flawlessly. Ellips now has full visibility of their network and actionable insights to monitor their traffic with Dimension. The company enjoys the full transparency of all their network traffic knowing that attacks are continuously prevented and remediated. Additionally, Ellips employees who travel frequently have secure and protected access to their proprietary software. Sander confirms: “Together with our partner, we have implemented the Fireboxes and AuthPoint in a short period of time. We are confident that our network is protected, but most importantly, WatchGuard made the deployment easy by preparing our employees for the new security solution.”