Cloetta secures cloud environment and infrastructure against cyber threats

Cloetta is one of Europe’s most successful confectionery businesses. Founded in 1862, it operates in the Nordics, the Netherlands and Italy. It manufactures and markets sugar confectionery, chocolate products, pastilles and chewing gum, including well-known brands like Läkerol,

Cloetta, Jenkki, Red Band and Sperlari. Cloetta’s products are sold in more than 50 markets worldwide. Listed on the Stockholm stock exchange and headquartered there, Cloetta has over 2500 employees in 14 countries.

IT facilitating sweet-making

To enable the growth of its confectionery business, Cloetta’s Group IT function supports the company through the provision of an efficient client landscape and technology infrastructure. Cloetta’s IT strategy is based on utilising commodity services and applications as much as possible, with the idea of reducing the infrastructure footprint and “smart-sourcing” some business critical processes.

Remote working is a key part of the company’s strategy to increase productivity and help grow the business, through enabling employees to work anywhere, at any time, using any device. For a similar reason, Cloetta is a strong advocate of cloud services. As GertJan Minkels, solution architect at Cloetta explains, “We have been using SaaS and IaaS for a long time and we really believe in the business benefits the cloud can bring. Migrating to applications like Microsoft 365 and Skype for Business has been a key part of our strategy to reduce our infrastructure footprint.” But a cloud environment and remote working don’t come without their security challenges.

Securing sweets

The secret of Cloetta’s success is that it has carefully guarded the recipes of its delicious confectionery for over 150 years. Added to that, Cloetta is a listed vehicle, so the company’s financial information is as top secret as its sweet recipes. But the openness of its IT architecture was a threat to the security of this information.

The use of cloud applications and the increase in remote working, meant more and more employees were using the internet to access services and gather information, which in turn increased the chance of getting infected by malicious applications. Like many organisations, Cloetta was also the target for cyber threats that proliferate through the use of email, such as phishing, spam, viruses and other malware.

Turning to Censornet

To secure its cloud environment and the remote working facility, Cloetta turned to Censornet’s Web Security solution. As GertJan explains, “In order to drive down our exposure to malicious applications, we found in USS Web Security a solution that would reduce the risk, without being limited by technology like proxy servers and centralised internet breakouts. We wanted the security but didn’t want to compromise our flexibility.”

To tackle the email threat issue, Cloetta implemented Censornet’s Email Security. GertJan says that, “Blocking phishing, viruses and other malware was our main goal, but the tool is also very effective at blocking spam messages.” Cloetta had previously used a spam-filtering tool from a well-known vendor.

How Censornet has hit the sweet spot

GertJan and his team had looked at a number of other industry solutions, but felt that Censornet was the right fit for the company. “We found that Censornet takes a really unique approach where it comes to designing its solutions – its different from the traditional products that competitors offer and leads to much more flexible protection,” GertJan explains.

“The Censornet team was really keen to understand Cloetta’s specific business issues and design a solution that would best protect Cloetta’s assets, whether that was our secret confectionery recipes or secure financial information.”