With a portfolio that includes a range of specialist services including Engineering, Security, Cleaning, Custody Support and Energy and Property Consultancy, Mitie is the UK’s leading facilities management and professional services company. It is also pioneering the Connected Workspace; a modern, integrated approach using smart analytics to provide insight and drive efficiencies to create outstanding work environments for customers. As an industry leader, Mitie has the expertise needed to provide comprehensive, end-to-end solutions that consolidate multiple business operations.

Mitie is headquartered in London, at the “Shard,” the tallest building in Western Europe.

Harmonising Services Across the Company While Reducing Costs

As a part of a recent company-wide initiative to streamline operations, improve controls while reducing operating costs, Mitie is shifting much of its IT infrastructure to the cloud. But to maintain its diverse service offerings, Mitie continues to integrate and support a variety of applications and platforms. With numerous office locations and many operations taking place at remote sites, Mitie must provide its staff with safe and secure Internet access from any location, whether onsite or off-premise.

Securing the Connected Workspace

Peter Woodsford, who heads Mitie’s Network and Infrastructure team, reached out to iboss after his team faced challenges with their existing solution. They regularly struggled with slow load times and found that the platform lacked visibility into cloud connectivity and diagnostics needed to determine a root cause.

As a large enterprise, Mitie needs a robust, flexible, and affordable security solution that can provide over 8,500 users with policy enforcement, malware protection, and data loss prevention (DLP).

That’s why they switched to iboss.

Securing devices from any location

When Mitie was ready to begin the deployment, a new iboss cloud account was quickly generated for them. Because the cloud architecture is based on containerization, it enables elastic scaling to support unlimited bandwidth while maintaining low latency.

To extend secure Internet access to their thousands of endpoints, Mitie deployed the iboss cloud Connector. The Cloud Connector ensures that users receive the same security and filtering policies regardless of their location, even when they are offsite. For redundancy, network tunnels were configured between main office locations and Mitie’s cloud gateways account. The iboss cloud has the versatility to accommodate a variety of connection types.

Standardise Services, Higher throughput and lower latency

Mitie was able to successfully migrate 8,500 endpoints to iboss in under three weeks. Performance gains were immediate and significant, especially for its network tunnels which saw a jump in average throughput. Latency was also reduced by the more efficient, containerized, architecture of the iboss cloud.

Thanks to its native integration with the Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS), traffic is now optimized between Microsoft and the iboss cloud. This reduces the load on site-to-site network links, minimizes the number of network hops, and provides Mitie’s users with a faster and more efficient Office 365 experience. The iboss cloud extends across all of Microsoft Azure for maximum global reach and coverage.

Seamless Integration With Third-Party Services

Since the iboss cloud provides 100% dedicated IP addresses to its customers, Mitie’s users will always present a source IP address that is associated with Mitie to the Internet. This means that users always appear to be accessing the Internet from within Mitie’s network regardless of whether they’re in the office or on the road. For a large enterprise that has many operations taking place at remote sites, this simplifies the integration with third-party services where access is typically restricted to the organization’s IP range.

Mitie uses a security information and event management (SIEM) solution for centralized log management. The iboss cloud provides direct real-time log streaming to SIEM services. Unlike other solutions, iboss doesn’t require a dedicated virtual appliance to act as an intermediary.

Here are some of the key areas where the iboss platform demonstrated strengths that aligned well with Mitie’s business requirements:

Complex policy definitions with inheritance and layers

iboss has an enterprise-class policy system that allows you to quickly apply the same set of base rules to multiple access policies. More specific rules or policy layers can then be added, allowing you to tailor the same base rules to different networks and groups. These time-saving capabilities are essential to large enterprises, where manually applying the same rules to a large number of policies would require an unacceptable amount of redundant work.

Cloud elasticity with containers

The iboss cloud is built around a containerized cloud architecture. This enables elastic scaling to support unlimited bandwidth while maintaining low latency. And because the architecture is based on containerization, the iboss cloud ensures that your private data never overlaps with other customers.

100% dedicated IP addresses

Since the iboss cloud provides 100% dedicated IP addresses to their customers, users always present a source IP address that is associated with your organization. This means that users always appear to be accessing the Internet from within your network regardless of whether they’re in the office or on the road. For a large enterprise that has many operations taking place at remote sites, this simplifies their integration with third-party services where access is typically restricted to the organization’s IP range.

Direct integration with SIEMs

The iboss cloud provides direct real-time log streaming to multiple SIEMs. Unlike other cloud solutions, the iboss doesn’t require a dedicated virtual appliance to communicate with it.

Detailed and granular reporting

The iboss cloud records events with detailed information, including usernames, IP addresses, full URLs, and more. Real-time dashboards enable you to quickly identify high-risk searches and behavior and provide a single pane of glass administration portal for policy orchestration across all web security services.

Comprehensive malware protection

Instead of relying on only one anti-virus vendor to provide malware protection, iboss uses an optimized combination of malware engines and threat feeds from industry-leading vendors and research labs. Multi-engine approaches offer more-thorough protection because each malware engine uses a different methodology. One engine often detects what another one misses.