Gama Aviation

Gama Aviation’s Security Takes Flight with Censornet USS

Gama Aviation is a London Stock Exchange listed global business aviation services company. The organisation specialises in providing aviation support for individuals, corporations and government agencies across multiple sectors including: private aviation, air ambulance, infrastructure monitoring, military applications and police air support. Due to a number of mergers and acquisitions over a number of years, Gama Aviation had multiple, disparate security tools in place and it sought a unified solution to standardise security across the business. Given Gama Aviation is a global organisation with offices around the world, it also wanted a solution that would offer the same level of protection no matter where employees are or what device they are using.

A unified solution

Over a period of four months, Gama Aviation reviewed a number of different security solutions, ultimately selecting Censornet’s Unified Security Service (USS) for its ease of use and cloud-based approach, allowing it to be installed and pushed out to all of its offices outside of the United States. In addition, a key reason for choosing Censornet was the flexibility around deployment and in particular the ability to install Agents on individual machines and not only on a gateway. This allows Gama Aviation’s IT team to see where it is deployed and who is being protected, which wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, and also ensures employees are protected wherever they are – whether in the office, at a customer site, or in an airport.

USS integrates cloud application security (CASB), email security, web security, and cloud multi-factor authentication (MFA) providing security teams with full visibility and control of cloud and web-based activity, as well as known, unknown & emerging email threats. The solution is policy-based, meaning security teams can completely standardise an approach to security and push the same policy around the organisation quickly and efficiently.

Mark Rockett, Group IT Manager at Gama Aviation, said: “Prior to Censornet USS we had lots of different solutions in place and if we wanted different policies we would have to change them on multiple firewalls individually and manually. With USS it is far simpler and we can push changes out to anything in the world. The policies and portal are really easy to use and it was spun up really quickly so there were no delays in ensuring all our offices and staff were quickly protected. It does everything we needed and wanted it to do.”

Unexpected benefits

The ROI for Gama Aviation comes from a level of confidence the solution provides and knowing that, because they are seeing sites being blocked, there is likely to be a drop in the threat level. It has also saved the business time – both from the perspective of the security team who no longer need to update policies on multiple solutions, as well as in terms of employees not spending time on websites they shouldn’t be during the working day.

While the driver for installing USS was security, Gama Aviation has also seen benefits of the solution for operational purposes. Where required, it has allowed the team to see when employees are using sites that they shouldn’t be and wasting time, which has been useful from a HR perspective.

USS also provides Gama Aviation with the ability to discover and gain full visibility of all cloud applications in use and for example, we are now able to prevent users from uploading sensitive or confidential data to unsanctioned cloud storage applications.

“It has given us more controls and we can enforce policies more as everyone is on an equal footing, rather than one office location being monitored more closely than others. Now everyone is being monitored at the same level.” said Rockett.