MSSP Success Story

Clavister secures complete remote IT services offering with virtual cells in private cloud environment.

“Bringing awareness to IT Security to our customers, and how fundamental it is to business continuity, is our primary aim of the Year of IT Security. We have the confidence in Clavister’s excellent technology to be major aspect of the offering we’re putting to our MSP customers, says Anders Arbin Product marketing manager IT Services for Konica Minolta.”

As a local system integrator, Konica Minolta recognized the challenge many small businesses have managing, running and securing their IT infrastructure.
For the Swedish market they developed a Managed Security as a Service offering surrounding their RemoteCare Workplace offering in order to provide small and medium enterprises with a full range of IT services.

These include remote workstation, server, backup and helpdesk among other services.
The challenges Konica Minolta faces in designing this service offering was to ensure that customer data is securely separated while keeping the opportunity to gain economies of scale.

Infrastructure is shared utilizing virtualization technology and providing each customer with their set of virtual machines. But Konica Minolta wanted to add more layers by separating the traffic and providing a secure connection directly from customer to their data.
In the solution it is critical that they can provide an end-to-end solution including the capability validate the ensuring authenticity of end-users.

DOWNLOAD CASE STUDY

To raise awareness of the need for secure IT services Konica and Clavister initiated the Year of the IT Security in 2018.

Cyber-attacks grow in our everyday lives every day. They can influence major political choices or damage the integrity of offending companies. Many take their IT environments for granted and underestimate all the risks that exist. When the danger is over, everything goes fast and you as an entrepreneur or private person must act quickly to minimize damage.

More cyber
security events

Cybercriminals
via email

Digital attacks
against SMB

Ransomeware
per year

Service Offering

As IT services provider to small and medium enterprises Konica Minolta offers a range of remote care services as a service. Full remote workstation offerings providing a virtual desktop to remote anti-virus for local clients, backup and other services are offered in 4 different packages from RemoteCare Workplace Light to Premium. The offering includes

a customer premises equipment that provides perimeter protection on the local network while creating a direct secure tunnel to the virtual private cell hosting the client’s services. To learn more, go to: RemoteCare.se

LEARN MORE

Solutions

The Virtual Security Gateways used are the Clavister Virtual Next Generation Firewall version 12.00.

The Customer Premises Equipment used varies depending on the size of the enterprise. For smaller officers the NGFW-E10 us used providing up to 1 Gpbs of perimeter protection and up to 100 Mbps of VPN connectivity.

The integrator utilizes Virtualized Security technology with integrated SD-WAN capabilities in order to provide a dedicated virtual secure cell per customer.
Each virtual security gateway image only requires 256 MB of RAM and 32 MB of disk space. Due to this extreme low footprint requirements, it’s possible to dedicate one virtual image to each end customer. The virtual security gateway provides not only perimeter security and routing services but also serves as a VPN gateway terminating the SD-WAN that is setup between a customer premises gateway and the dedicated virtual security gateway.

Customer premises gateways come in various sizes matching the office’s capacity requirement and can also be VPN clients directly build into the client’s devices to provide secure remote working facilities. To ensure authenticity of the users a Multi Factor Authentication system is deployed providing 2nd passwords via SMS or smartphone applications. As the service becomes successful Konica Minolta operates the images utilizing a central management consoles providing policy management, security logging etc in one central location. The virtual security gateway is compatible with all major hypervisor suppliers including VMWare, RedHat’s KVM and Microsoft’s Hyper-V, providing the flexibility needed to adjust to customer’s preferred environments.

LEARN MORE

Results

Konica Minolta chose Clavister because of the rich set of security use-cases available both in physical appliance form factor as well as virtualized. The low footprint requirements enabling easy deployment of thousands of virtual security gateways on one and the same hypervisor infrastructure was a major factor for Konica Minolta to enable a secure IT as a service offering.

The Clavister SD-WAN solution is a proven scalable VPN Solution that is easily managed form a centralized management console, end-2-end. Integrated with the solution Clavister provides the Multi Factor Authentication platform as well to provide secure methods of authenticating users.

With the Clavister portfolio surrounding the IT services Konica Minolta has become a Managed Security Service Provider further easing the IT management talks to be done by their clients. The results are an easily manageable cost-effective solution where the privacy for customers’ data is guaranteed.

About Konica Minolta – Secure Remote Workplace

Konica Minolta provides effective IT infrastructure management services to small and medium enterprises in the Nordics. The solution includes applications, server monitoring, management tools for business processes and 24/7 remote control capabilities giving customers time for their key tasks.

LEARN MORE