Customer Background
A leading management consultancy firm in Singapore adopted Sangfor Access Secure to address challenges in securing access to internal applications and preventing sensitive data leaks.
Challenges
Modern enterprises often pursue digital transformation to become more innovative and responsive to customer needs. This involves providing employees with secure and efficient access to critical applications and resources anytime and anywhere without compromising productivity.
The Singaporean management consultancy firm undertook similar initiatives, shifting to a culture of workplace flexibility.
- Employees and contractors across 10+ countries connected to the Singapore headquarters via VPN to access company resources.
- This presented significant challenges for the IT infrastructure team, as managing multiple security appliances at each branch was costly, complex, and time-consuming.
- Frequent firewall patches and upgrades required specialized IT staff, and the HQ team had to initiate remote connections to branches individually for maintenance.
- These challenges led to complex daily operations, contributing to misconfigurations, unpatched appliances, data leaks, and security incidents.
In response, company management demanded a significant upgrade for their existing firewall and VPN solutions to strengthen security and reduce operational expenses.
Sangfor Solution
Sangfor Access Secure was selected after an apples-to-apples comparison of existing infrastructure capabilities and costs, proving to be a superior solution.
- The platform connects users and business locations to enterprise resources—including cloud environments and data centers—through a global backbone with over 70 Points of Presence (POPs).
- It integrates Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS), Endpoint Protection, and more—all managed via a centralized administrative console. This unified architecture ensures consistent security policy enforcement across users and locations.
Impressed by these capabilities, the firm’s IT leaders postponed planned hardware upgrades to evaluate Sangfor Access Secure. Thanks to its simplicity and integration, a proof of concept (POC) was completed within weeks, leading to full production deployment in under a month.
Solution Benefits
Comprehensive Security Coverage:
- Sangfor Access Secure provides end-to-end security for all remote access needs of mobile and branch users, covering internet access (with SGA), internal app access and cloud access (with ZTG), and endpoint security—all within a single solution.
- The Secured Global Access (SGA) component enforces internet access control policies, providing URL and application control, as well as auditing capabilities for internet usage. This has allowed the firm to prevent employees, including those on personal devices, from accessing malicious or undesirable content that could compromise security or productivity. It also delivers real-time threat protection against malware, botnet and Man-in-the-Middle attacks, vulnerability exploits, and more.
- The Zero Trust Guard (ZTG) component replaced FortiGate’s SSL VPN and NetSkope Private Access, enabling secure access to private applications hosted in the Singapore data center and AWS cloud environments. With ZTG, the introduction of adaptive access control and continuous security posture checks enhanced the overall security posture multifold.
Simplified Management:
- A cloud-based, centralized management portal consolidates enterprise security and network operations globally, ensuring the enforcement of unified security policies across all users, devices, and locations. This has resulted in near-zero misconfigurations, data leaks, and security incidents since deployment.
- Automatic upgrades and patches offered by the Access Secure Service eliminated the need for manual intervention by the HQ IT team, reducing management overhead by over 30%.
- Today, the scalable, cloud-based solution supports over 800 mobile users across 10+ countries in Asia, Europe, and North America without incurring any hardware management or maintenance costs.
Unparalleled Visibility:
- All network traffic is routed through the Sangfor cloud backbone with uncapped SSL decryption, giving administrators 360-degree user visibility and granular control through detailed logs, alerts, protection measures, and traceability.
- Local POP presence and a private edge deployment model ensured full control over data, with locally stored logs to meet enterprise compliance requirements.
Future Plans
The customer continues to expand the scope of Sangfor Access Secure within their organization and plans to roll out the solution to its third-party contractors and vendors.
