The Customer is a newly established EU agency to provide a long-term solution for the operational management of large-scale IT systems instrumental to the asylum, border management and migration policies of the EU.
The agency was established in 2011, with over 200 employees and have offices throughout Europe.
The Challenge
The Customer was not new to the concept of data classification, in fact they already had an existing solution in place when they began exploring Fortra's Classifier Suite, although it only covered email messages and was not as effective as they expected.
Whilst the existing solution for email message provided basic functionality, it highlighted gaps in classification coverage. As a result, the Security Team at wanted to broaden classification support throughout the organization to documents, mobiles and SharePoint. By extending classification out from just email, they hoped that their staff would become more aware of data sensitivity, and the importance of keeping all data they process safe, across all aspects of their business. This kind of best practice means the organization’s users would be adding another layer of security, while being aware and accountable for their actions, and reducing the risk of sensitive data leakage.
Like most other organizations processing the data of EU Citizens, the Customer was also aware that they needed to further support their compliance initiative for the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which they could achieve through this classification extension.
The Solution
When looking to extend their classification solution, the Customer chose to look elsewhere, rather than stay with the incumbent classification provider. The decision to move away from this provider was reflective of a number of things, including product quality, cost effectiveness and flexibility around the user licensing model.
When the Customer compared the Fortra's Classifier Suite solution against the incumbent, they quickly decided Classifier to be the favorable data classification tool. This was down to the ease of implementation and configuration of Classifier compared to the existing solution. Fortra's Classifier Suite’s commercial flexibility was another key factor, according to the organization, by tailoring the licensing model more accurately reflex their needs.
Overall, the Customer has found Fortra's Classifier Suite to be superior to their former provider in terms of product quality, price and service. Deployment is in progress throughout the organization, and will be completed by the end of February 2018. The Security Team have produced internal communications to raise awareness of the new solution within the organization, and shall be running internal training sessions to ensure everyone is comfortable with using Classifier. They anticipate this to be pain free, as Classifier is so easy to use, and employees have the same user experience whether they are classifying an email, word document, PowerPoint etc.
Conclusion
Once the Customer has fully deployed the Classifier Foundation Suite, they will move on to Mobile and SharePoint Classifier. In the future, the organization will also look at integrating Classifier into their DLP solution to help drive policies and improve solution efficiency but want to focus on the introduction of Classifier to their users first.
The Security Team are confident that the full roll out of the product will be very successful and will be able to review the success of the document markings they have chosen once users have had sufficient time to apply classification to the data they are creating. Furthermore, they have peace of mind that Fortra's Classifier Suite will be able to amend any labels and marking with ease should they want to evolve their classification policy to meet new business needs.