Fukuoka Jisho Deploys Netskope Across Seven Group Companies to Deliver Secure Access Anywhere, Powered by SSE

The DX Promotion Department manages IT infrastructure across seven group companies, including subsidiaries. “Our mission is to provide an environment where employees can focus on the work of building our city,” says Takeharu Terashi, Section Manager of the DX Promotion Department. The department is organized into an IT Systems team and a Business Efficiency team, with the IT Systems team responsible for operating IT infrastructure and security across the group.

The spread of COVID-19 drove a sharp increase in employees accessing internal systems and cloud services from outside the office. As users and data extended beyond the corporate network, it became clear that the traditional approach of defending a fixed network perimeter could no longer provide consistent security. Fukuoka Jisho therefore set out to modernize the network and security supporting remote access. “We wanted to create an environment where employees could work outside the office with confidence, while also reducing the operational burden of our on-premises systems,” Terashi says. “So we decided to move to the cloud and to zero trust in stages.”

On functionality, the company valued the ability to identify cloud services and control access not just by tenant or instance, but at the API level. “For example, we can let employees use only the Slack workspace the company has approved, while allowing them to view messages but restricting posting — that kind of fine-grained control,” Terashi explains. “We saw it as a capability we’d need in the future, and that’s part of why we chose Netskope.”

The decision was reinforced by App Catalog (formerly the Netskope Cloud Confidence Index), which assesses and surfaces the risk of cloud services. “We were fielding a steady stream of requests to adopt new cloud services, and vetting the safety of each one individually was a heavy burden,” Terashi explains. “Using Netskope’s risk assessments let us cut that effort dramatically.” This also gave Fukuoka Jisho a way to identify and curb shadow IT — unauthorized cloud services — while easing the burden on the administrators who decide what to approve.

From the second year of deployment onward, Fukuoka Jisho accelerated its rollout to group companies. Takehisa Kitahara of the DX Promotion Department, explains how Netskope’s pre-logon user mode solved an authentication problem that arose from retiring the company’s closed network during PC kitting. “Netskope lets us connect to the Active Directory server even before a user signs in, securing the communication authentication requires — which let us roll out to group companies smoothly,” Kitahara says.

The rollout to each company was also designed to minimize the burden on the field. Fukuoka Jisho moved away from having group companies procure PCs individually, standardizing instead on centralized kitting by the DX Promotion Department. The company also explained to users that Netskope inspects and visualizes network traffic, which helped raise security awareness. For its hotel business, which operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, Fukuoka Jisho is preparing a policy to restrict uploads to unauthorized cloud storage. To limit the impact on frontline staff, it plans to first validate the policy with hotel managers who don’t handle front-desk duties, then gradually extend it to front-desk staff.