Helvetia provides insurance services to more than 4.7 million customers

Helvetia provides a comprehensive range of insurance services to more than 4.7 million customers with a presence in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Austria, Spain, France, Luxembourg, and Jersey. In Switzerland alone, Helvetia serves more than 750,000 private and business customers with 6,700 employees.

Achieving high customer satisfaction and trust is one of Helvetia’s primary goals. The company is committed to delivering high-quality, secure services for customers and its employees. Therefore, having a secure IT environment is a critical part of Helvetia’s operations.

“The insurance business is based on trust,” said Andreas Hagin, Head of Corporate Network & Unified Communication Engineering in Corporate IT Operations at Helvetia. “Focusing on customers is firmly anchored in our values and we set very high standards for ourselves and our IT security.”

Next Step: Automation

 Like most IT organizations, Helvetia’s IT team is always looking for ways to handle a rapidly growing volume of work with the same number of employees. That means minimizing the number of manual tasks required of team members, reducing the need to retrain and redeploy teams, and find new ways to deliver services as efficiently as possible. Helvetia sees automation and adopting a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) strategy as the means to increased efficiency.

“We have been pursuing the vision of automation for years,” said Hagin. “Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is the perfect solution for this.”

Security with Flexibility

 As Helvetia began its SDDC project, it had several challenges: create a new internal IT team structure, extend its VMware virtualized environment, and find a solution to secure it. Helvetia initiated a proof of concept to test its first steps toward a new SDDC based on VMware NSX.”

“We built a virtual team comprised of storage, security, VMware, and network specialists,” Hagin said. “Then we scouted the market for a suitable security product and found what we were looking for with Check Point CloudGuard for VMware NSX.”

Helvetia chose VMware NSX to reproduce its data center networking environment functionality in the hypervisor layer. Check Point CloudGuard Network Security integrates with VMware NSX to deliver multi-layered defenses. Check Point CloudGuard Network Security protects east-west traffic within the VMware-deployed data center. It transparently enforces security at the hypervisor level and between virtual machines, automatically quarantines infected machines for remediation, and provides comprehensive visibility into virtual network traffic trends and threats.

The Right Security Choice

 With involvement from stakeholders in all key departments, Hagin and his team executed the proof of concept on schedule and with pinpoint accuracy. Although Hagin had been concerned that it would be more difficult to retain visibility across the entire virtualized architecture, those fears were soon laid to rest.

“Check Point CloudGuard for NSX is the right product to move us forward in our Software Defined Data Center Strategy,” said Hagin. “Deploying CloudGuard for VMware NSX gives us the visibility we need with a role-based model.”

Great Efficiency

 With Check Point CloudGuard Network Security, Helvetia gains outstanding threat prevention efficiency without having to make additional firewall changes. Hagin’s team can import the same VMware NSX security tags that they currently use for automated server deployment to the security policy, which saves time.

“In addition to the threat prevention advantages the Check Point solution provides, we see a primary benefit in continuing to use a globally tested management interface integrated into a modern SDDN design,” said Hagin “We don’t have to retrain our employees.”

Hagin concluded by saying that, “We at Helvetia are pleased that by implementing this solution, we will increase the degree of automation, configure our service deployment faster and maintain or improve the degree of security.”