Onecom centralise protection of their remote workforce

Minimal effort; maximum security

Onecom is the UK’s largest independent business telecommunications provider delivering fixed-line, mobile, unified communications, and connectivity solutions. Its operation needs to allow for remote-working at scale, which meant that it needed a centralised security platform that could protect its 400+ employees outside of the traditional workplace perimeter, while minimising the demand for internal IT resources. As Onecom is also looking to grow rapidly in the next three to five years, having a security solution that could scale alongside the company was very important.

In particular, Onecom was looking to protect employees from email attacks, such as phishing, and threats over the web, as well as save the IT team time and resources when it came to implementing security solutions alongside maintaining the highest levels of compliance. Alan Stanley, Head of Technical Operations at Onecom had previously done security by proxy, but needed a solution for remote workers.

“The reason I was so attracted to Censornet was that they use an agent, so you don’t have to use proxies or fiddle around with VPNs. We wanted to make sure our remote workforce had the highest levels of security while ensuring we remain fit for auditing and compliance with GDPR. The ability to easily protect our employees remotely was therefore especially important for us,” said Stanley.

Automatic defence brings peace of mind

Censornet’s multi-layered approach to email security analyses hundreds of variables per email to identify and protect Onecom from modern phishing threats, such as impersonation attacks. Even though Onecom is Cyber Essentials certified and actively holds training on cyber security principles, the company felt that education alone was not going to stop these phishing attacks.

“Before Censornet we only had Microsoft 365 which offers rudimentary spam filtering, but we found that it was a bit of a blunt instrument and did not stop more sophisticated threats,” said Stanley. “Phishing attacks, in particular, had been an ongoing issue for the company, and we knew that employee education could only go so far – we needed better email filtering to catch dangerous emails. When we looked at Censornet email security in-depth, we were shown the integration with threat intelligence sources to catch attacks. That was a tick in the box for us.”

Moreover, the fact that web security and email security are linked together in a consolidated solution means that if a new zero-day attack were to emerge, the two Censornet products would share data to ensure protection. This has removed IT’s burdensome manual task of having to monitor and update web permissions to ensure that employees are not accessing sites on the web that could be putting the company at risk.

“Previously, if I knew an employee was doing something that could potentially result in a cyber attack, I would have to manually update the system to block that website or ensure security measures were installed. The Censornet platform means I no longer need to have full oversight and that a lot of the protection is done automatically – I know it is working in the background ensuring that those links are being scanned,” said Stanley.

Onecom has been given extra peace of mind that attacks are being stopped by Linkscan™ – part of Censornet’s email security service. Linkscan™ provides time-of-click protection from malicious links in emails, giving certainty of security wherever the user is and however many re-directs the malicious content or site is hidden behind.

Sophisticated solutions make security easy

The ease of use of the Censornet platform means that Onecom can roll out, monitor and manage core security services for remote users from one consolidated platform, saving valuable time for the busy IT team and ensuring consistency and compliance across users.

“We’ve made quite a big deal of the fact that employees have all the same filtering on their email as anybody that would’ve been using a standard set up in the office, even if they are at home,” said Stanley.

Onecom has also been impressed by the quality of customer support fromCensornet, with a smooth migration for a considerable project, and ongoing expertise at their disposal.

“IT management has changed. Before you would need to have multiple people proficient in different aspects of IT in order to protect and update the full system. Everything is easier now, because it is all in one place – which means we can do everything all at once,” said Stanley.

“Things were made even easier by the excellent support from Censornet. As tech people ourselves, we want to put a provider through their paces, but there was no smoke and mirrors with Censornet – their platform delivered exactly what was promised. The team is knowledgeable about their tech and because they could explain their product in detail, when it came to installing it and getting it up and running the deployment was executed easily on both sides,” concluded Stanley.