Founded in 1969, Apsen is a drug manufacturer, national 100%, which operates in areas such as urology, rheumatology, otolaryngology, neurology, geriatrics, psychiatry, gastroenterology, gynecology, orthopedics and general practice. The company, based in São Paulo, has around 950 employees and a turnover of R$ 450 million.
Pharmaceutical companies are considered targets for cybercrime as they store sensitive data and intellectual property such as drug formulas, studies and confidential research. Therefore, they need a highly controlled environment to avoid the risk of information leakage.
Jaques dos Reis Souza, Apsen's Infrastructure and Service Desk Coordinator, says that the company has a goal of doubling revenue by 2020 and has defined strategies for that, including greater efficiency in the IT environment and a more modern, reliable and easy to manage.
Apsen's IT structure is made up of 80 servers, between physical and virtual, and about 400 desktops. The company has been using McAfee security solutions for over 10 years and was looking to update its infrastructure with the most modern on the market.
“We used the same solutions for a long time and they were meeting our needs, but we wanted to know if it was possible to improve, if what we had was slowing down the machines, if there was something better available on the market. We also saw the need to implement new solutions with functions dedicated to data loss prevention and encryption”, explains Souza.
The company researched other solutions on the market and chose to continue with Intel Security solutions, especially due to the scope of the products and the possibility of integration between agents, which was not offered by the competition.
Licenses were acquired for endpoint security (McAfee Endpoint Protection), data leakage (McAfee Data Loss Prevention), encryption (McAfee Complete Data Protection) and advanced threat security based on behavior analysis (McAfee Threat Intelligence Exchange) ), plus McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator, which enables centralized management of all solutions from a single console. The project started at the end of 2016 and will update the security solutions on all the company's workstations.
Apsen also hired IT staff training and consulting services to help analyze environments, develop best practice policies, get to know each solution in depth and explore all available resources.
Project advantages
Souza comments that, with the completion of the project, desktops will be lighter, more agile and protected, the IT team will have greater control over what happens at the stations, it will be possible to create indicators and use the reports to make faster and more assertive decisions. The ease of managing the solutions will also allow the team to have more free time to focus on other activities.
With solutions that are based on threat behavior analysis and do not rely solely on signatures, such as TIE, it will be easier to identify and combat advanced and unknown threats, including ransomware. And with the DLP solution, it will be possible to combat information leakage with strict control of all files that leave the company, whether by e-mail, file sent to printer, print screen, etc. “The notebooks used by the field team will also be fully encrypted to increase security in case of loss or theft and prevent information leakage.”, explains Souza.
Updating the solutions will increase the company's information security maturity, create a standardized environment and generate greater visibility and ease of solution management. For the future, the company is considering investing in other endpoint solutions.
“We have the best solutions available on the market, Intel Security understood our need and presented us with proactive, business-oriented solutions that really bring return”, concludes Souza.
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