JAL Digital Enhances Cloud Security with Netskope

For JAL Digital, which performs a wide range of IT-related work both inside and outside the Group, the use of cloud computing and the security issues it raises are inevitable. Yoshinori Hachiya, who is in charge of formulating cybersecurity strategies, talks about the problems the company has faced.

“Until now, we have operated a security system based on perimeter defense. However, when Gmail and Microsoft 365 were introduced and data was sent to the cloud, the question became how to protect the data that was leaving the company.”

Hachiya had become aware of the existence of CASB through discussions with other companies facing the same issue. However, there was another reason behind the decision to actually implement CASB. Kazuya Koizumi, who was in charge of cybersecurity strategy at the time, recalls the situation as follows.

“The trigger was the coronavirus. We tried to strengthen our VPNs and continue with perimeter-type security, but the sudden shift to working from home resulted in more traffic than we had anticipated, such as videoconferencing, and the VPN and Internet connection became bottlenecks. We realized that expanding the use of the cloud itself was impossible with security measures that relied on VPNs, and we decided to accelerate the deployment of CASB.”

When selecting a CASB product, Hachiya referred to the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. From the security products listed, he looked for a solution that met the following requirements:

• has a sales channel in Japan
• has a certain market share
• a product that is recognized by leading companies

After searching for a solution that met these requirements, they came across Netskope. They then proceeded with their investigation by comparing other companies’ products with Netskope as the benchmark.

Although Hachiya felt from the beginning that Netskope would be the one to choose, the deciding factor in their selection was tenant visualization.

“For example, with Gmail, no matter how many URLs you try to pull up, you can only tell that it’s Gmail. But with Netskope, you can tell whether it’s a private Gmail account or whether it’s your company or another company’s, and you can even identify the tenant. We evaluated it based on the fact that you can see the tenant for each cloud service, not just Gmail.”

In addition, Hachiya says that they also highly evaluated the fact that, by combining decoded SSL communication with DLP, it is possible to detect information that should not be handled after looking at the contents of the data.

Hachiya says that even after the full-scale introduction, the performance was the same as that confirmed during the PoC. He says that even when users access sites with security risks, they can be tracked and blocked properly.

“We were aware that it would be difficult to evaluate false positives and false negatives without operating SWG in a real environment, so we were a little worried about putting it into production, but our concerns turned out to be unfounded. We also operate competing products within the group, and we obtain information on individual malicious URLs, etc., but when we check them, they are already registered in Netskope’s security risk categories, so we have a great sense of security in the fact that we can automatically control connections.

In addition, even when data moves between cloud services, for example when data is passed from the storage service that JAL Digital has contracted with to the client’s storage, it is possible to visualize things like which user is sending what data, who (which tenant) is receiving the data, so Hachiya says that “as the administrator, I can still feel secure.”