Laurenty Unifies Security to Comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Present everywhere in Belgium as well as in Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and France, Laurenty is a family group specialising in cleaning, road sweeping, building and green spaces. With an annual turnover of more than €120 million, the company serves around 5,000 clients thanks to its 4,300 employees.

Simplify Management and Increase Security

In 2015, Laurenty realized that its IT security infrastructure was technically outdated and fragmented. Several point products were used to address specific security challenges. Using products from multiple vendors means several consoles, different approaches and no global visibility. “Instead of renewing the existing licenses, you might as well investigate the market to find the very best solution to secure both the network and the endpoints,” says Laurent Grutman, CIO at Laurenty.

Responding to Strict Regulations

From May 2018, all European companies will need to demonstrate, at any given time, that all personal data held by them is protected and, in particular, that it could not be used in the event of theft. This new European regulation is known as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and, if it is contravened, the company in question may have to pay severe penalties of up to 4% of its annual turnover.

To protect its laptops against data breaches Laurenty needed a strong
encryption solution.

Advanced Threat Prevention

With the help of Shinka, an IT security integrator and a recognized Check Point partner, a global solution was implemented, protecting both endpoints and network while incorporating the principles of Check Point.

The first priority was to protect the company’s endpoint devices against zero day and other advanced threats. Check Point SandBlast Agent protects Laurenty against all kinds of unknown malware, bots, phishing and ransomware attacks.

Anti-ransomware is part of SandBlast Agent and doesn’t only stop the spread of ransomware, it also recovers your data in case some files were already encrypted. Next to antimalware that is still needed to protect against known viruses, Laurenty was also looking for a good solution to protect themselves against data breaches caused by stolen or lost laptops. By using full disk and media encryption and port protection, all endpoint security requirements were met, which help Laurenty achieve GDPR compliancy.

Laurenty chose Check Point’s Complete Endpoint Protection Suite as it brings them data security, network security, advanced threat prevention, forensics and remote access VPN for complete endpoint protection in one package and it’s manageable with one console. Phase two was the replacement of the old gateways with the new Check Point 5600 appliances with SandBlast Next Generation Threat Prevention (NGTX) to defend the company’s network against zero-day threats.

SandBlast incorporates two technologies, explains Laurent Verhees of Shinka. Each email attachment, such as Excel, PDF, etc., is now forwarded to Check Point SandBlast cloud for inspection. SandBlast emulates and scans the attachment for malware and only if the file is clean, sends it back to Laurenty. While this process can take a few minutes, Threat Extraction strips out any active content that can be malicious and delivers a clean version of the attachment in a matter of seconds without business delay to the end user.

Email recipients have access to a safe, “static” version of the attachment only. “This static file is generally all that our employees need, so there is no delay in getting our work done. We just know that data is secure,” adds Laurent Grutman of Laurenty.

Consolidated Management
Laurenty was one of the first customers in Belgium to implement the newest version of Check Point security management R80.10. The installation went flawlessly and R80.10 brings a lot of advantages, such as consolidated security into one place with one console, integrated threat management and a unified policy.

Prevention-driven Cyber Security
By choosing Check Point to protect both the endpoints as well as the network, Laurenty is already seeing the advantages of Check Point, which focuses on delivering the most advanced threat prevention.

“Each new computer is now automatically equipped with SandBlast Agent. Knowing we will be protected against the most advanced threats including ransomware gives us complete peace of mind,” emphasizes Laurent Grutman.

Consistent Security and Shared Threat Intelligence
Check Point breaks down security silos by ensuring comprehensive and timely intelligence across the entire infrastructure. Check Point ThreatCloud houses all threat intelligence, which is derived from a broad array of sources.

“We are really pleased with the unified approach to security provided by Check Point,” explains Laurent Grutman. “All of our security platforms communi-cate and share data with each other, which means that rather than just relying on detection, we know that we are actively preventing problems from occurring. This gives us confidence that our corporate and customer data is secure.”

“For the near future we are investigating how we can protect our corporate data on mobile devices, even on the privately owned ones,” says Laurent Grutman. “Capsule Workspace – a secure container on the mobile device containing all business related data –avoids data loss like the encryption solution we use on the endpoints. It allows you to separate personal and business content and since all data in the container is encrypted it also helps in achieving GDPR compliancy,” explains Laurent Vanhees from Shinka.”

Unified and Efficient Management of the Entire Security Network Through a Single Pane of Glass
The main reason Laurenty chose Check Point endpoint solution besides the advanced threat prevention capabilities is the fact that all the endpoint suite products can be managed by one single console. This makes the task of managing the complete endpoint suite much easier.

The integration of endpoint and network security management is an additional benefit as you can perform security forensics, security analysis and search security events from one management appliance.

“The collaboration with Shinka and Check Point was really successful. We have recently launched our own IT company, LGTech, and we will be working with Shinka to provide our customers with Check Point security solutions,” concluded Laurent Grutman.

For more information, visit: www.checkpoint.com/sandblast/