"Our customers trust us because we’ve taken the necessary measures to protect both our information and theirs. BlackBerry helps us live up to that trust."
— Collin Buechler, Information Security, Data Privacy & Compliance officer, ConvergeOne
Headquartered in Minnesota, ConvergeOne works with over 11,000 clients worldwide.
A leader in cloud communication, collaboration, and digital modernization, ConvergeOne prides itself on being innovative and forward thinking. Thanks to this mindset, it recognized the shortcomings of traditional security tools, particularly their overreliance on perimeter-based protections.
This realization saw the company adopt Zero Trust with the help of CylanceEDGE™, CylanceENDPOINT™ and BlackBerry® UEM.
“As an organization, ConvergeOne follows our own strict security practices, all of which we apply to clients,” continues Buechler. “We really want to drive home the importance of a secure environment. That wouldn’t be possible if our own environment weren’t secure.”
Mitigation Time for Zero-Day Ransomware
Saved in Hardware Purchases
Service Call Volumes
Other solutions that say they can do the same thing as BlackBerry are usually very, very difficult to implement. With BlackBerry, it’s easier than installing an operating system. This is really where I’ve been just flabbergasted at the support and awestruck at the diligence that the BlackBerry Professional Services team has put in for us.
Collin Buechler, information security, data privacy & compliance officer, ConvergeOne
With Nearly 4000 Global Employees, A Traditional Perimeter Was Impossible
Against such a vast expanse of remote staff, any legacy security stack would collapse. Regular acquisitions made this even more challenging.
“Originally, we’d open a VPN tunnel to a company right after acquiring it,” Buechler explains. “But that introduced a ton of baggage and nasty post-purchase surprises. The cost of decommissioning old hardware was also an issue.”
Ultimately, ConvergeOne began considering a BYOD approach alongside Zero Trust Network Access — then the pandemic happened.
From Region Lock to Remote Access
Among its 4,000 global staff, ConvergeOne employs 200 engineers in India, who originally connected to ConvergeOne's network through a firewall exception — something which became unsustainable during the pandemic.
“We were given only five days’ notice that everyone was being sent home,” recalls Buechler. "Our choices were to lose the majority of our APAC personnel, remove our region lock, or find an alternative to our corporate VPN."
Having just begun a two-month pilot of BlackBerry UEM, ConvergeOne chose to deploy the solution’s browser-based workspace to its engineers.
“We moved into full production in three days,” continues Buechler. “By the time they were sent home, all of our remote engineers could access our environment.”
"With BlackBerry, I don’t care what's installed on an endpoint."
ConvergeOne ultimately decided to globally deploy BlackBerry's software. BlackBerry Digital Workplace and BlackBerry UEM allowed it to support BYOD across its distributed ecosystem, while BlackBerry Workspaces enabled file-centric security. It replaced its signature-based antivirus software with CylanceENDPOINT.
Finally, CylanceEDGE ties all of these solutions together, allowing ConvergeOne to fully replace its existing VPN infrastructure.
“VPNs enable broad and implicitly trusted access to your network which an attacker can easily exploit to spread malware or exfiltrate data,” Buechler explains. “CylanceEDGE doesn’t suffer from this problem. It walls off assets and applications so they can’t see or interact with each other.”
Protecting Data No Matter Where It Resides
After deploying BlackBerry, ConvergeOne was able to seamlessly onboard 500 employees with MacBooks rather than deploying 500 new Dell workstations. When ransomware from an infected client attempted to attack ConvergeOne's container on another occasion, CylanceENDPOINT immediately terminated the connection.
“Zero days are no longer a concern,” Buechler explains. “We no longer worry that we might be targeted before our antivirus recognizes a threat.”
"Zero trust is about protecting data where it lives," he concludes. "BlackBerry makes that easy to do."
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