- Customer Profile: Management, technology, & corporate finance consulting; 340 employees
- Goals: Secure project communications
- Solution: PGP Universal™ Gateway Email
- Deployment: On time & within budget
- Alternatives: Difficult to manage; limited expandability
- Benefits: Satisfy customer desire for security
PGP® technology allows Helbling to secure email communications with customers.
The Helbling Group is the leading Swiss management, technology, and corporate finance consultancy, and posted revenue of CHF 76.1 million (US$62.4 million) in 2006. The company’s 340 employees in Switzerland and Germany guide multinational enterprises, including Audi, Logitech, and Nestlé, to boost innovation, growth, and profitability. Helbling’s corporate finance division also helps customers complete mergers and acquisitions.
Helbling needed to secure electronic messages to ensure customer confidentiality, especially on high-profile projects. Most Helbling customers consider their new technological designs and acquisition plans top secret. They already encrypted emails about their projects internally and wanted this information protected when they sent it to Helbling as well.
Christoph Rothlin, Helbling’s chief information officer (CIO), screened the market for adequate solutions. After some evaluations, he reduced his short list to two companies: PGP Corporation and a Swiss vendor. When asked how he learned about PGP® encryption, he chuckles, “I’d be in the wrong job if I didn’t know about PGP® products.”
Rothlin chose PGP Universal Gateway Email, which does not require additional software on desktops. Email encryption is so central to Helbling’s security policy that Rothlin licensed PGP Universal Gateway Email for all users. He liked the solution because it was easy to manage. “We wanted email encryption to run without requiring much attention. PGP Universal Gateway Email’s Web-based interface was very intuitive. We could easily manage the system even if we hadn’t touched it for several months. The alternative product seemed much more complicated.”
Expandable solution. With the introduction of PGP Universal Gateway Email, Helbling has effectively introduced the PGP® Encryption Platform, the underlying framework of all PGP applications that handles comprehensive policy enforcement, key management, recovery, and reporting services. As additional PGP solutions are deployed, they leverage this common infrastructure, which provides lower operational costs and faster implementation compared to point solutions.
Strong regional presence. Not only did PGP® technology provide the building blocks for future needs, but PGP Corporation’s excellent reputation also influenced Rothlin’s decision. “PGP Corporation and its reseller were flexible and knowledgeable,” he says. He often met with PGP representatives and resellers and received answers to his questions on the same day. “The strong PGP presence in German-speaking countries was key to the project’s success,” he adds.
The implementation was completed successfully on schedule and within budget. “We completed the project in less than 142 hours, including all meetings, hardware orders, and installation,” says Rothlin. “The monthly maintenance effort is insignificant.” Although the time spent administering the email server is minimal, the company trained three IT administrators on PGP Universal Gateway Email to ensure business continuity.
Flexible solution. Because PGP Universal Gateway Email supports both OpenPGP and S/MIME, the two leading messaging security standards, Helbling employees can securely communicate with anyone who uses standards-based email encryption. Recipients that do not use an encryption solution can still securely send and receive emails. They simply connect their Internet browser to Helbling’s PGP Universal™ Web Messenger website.
PGP Universal™ Satellite, an alternative to PGP Universal Web Messenger, makes secure messaging even easier, allowing external recipients to receive emails directly in their inbox rather than visiting a website. In one case, a customer’s board member preferred the inbox option because it automatically secures messages to Helbling as well. “No other product we looked at offered this feature,” says Rothlin.
Easy to use. After PGP Universal Gateway Email went live, Rothlin invited all employees to lunch workshops. His user training was short: PGP Universal Gateway Email automatically encrypts emails to certain Helbling partners. If employees want to encrypt emails to other recipients, they can mark an email as confidential or add the “@” sign to the subject line. “PGP Universal Gateway Email is so simple to use that everyone understood it straight away,” Rothlin says.
Low operational cost. The system is also easy for IT administrators to use. When a new employee joins Helbling, the IT staff simply adds the user to the central Microsoft Windows Active Directory. Because PGP Universal Gateway Email can leverage the directory, it can automatically add the new user to its database. Companies save money when such repetitive daily tasks are automated.
Helbling has outsourced its data center and administers PGP Universal Gateway Email through a Web interface. The server’s hardware, designed to be redundant for high availability, is able to handle a multiple of the current load. “The performance and scalability of PGP Universal Gateway Email have been excellent. We won’t need to upgrade our hardware for several years,” says Rothlin.
Rothlin believes he made the right decision in selecting PGP® encryption. “I’ve received positive feedback all around—from IT staff, users, and business partners,” says Rothlin. “The demand from our business units to introduce email encryption was central to the success of the project.”
Lower risk. PGP Universal Gateway Email encryption is an important part of managing the company’s risks. “Email encryption is like insurance,” says Rothlin. “Even if you can’t calculate the exact risk, the potential cost of a security breach is too high to do without it.”
Quality service. Apart from internal risk management, the project also sends a positive message to Helbling’s customer base. “Our ability to use secure email is a clear sign of the quality of our service offerings,” says Rothlin.
About the PGP Encryption Platform. The PGP Encryption Platform reduces the complexities of protecting business data by enabling organizations to deploy and manage multiple encryption applications cost-effectively from a single management console. Deployed with the first encryption application, the PGP Encryption Platform makes installing a separate or additional infrastructure unnecessary when the organization needs other encryption applications. The PGP Encryption Platform supports the broadest range of integrated applications to secure email, laptops, desktops, instant messaging (IM), PDAs, network storage, FTP or bulk data transfers, and backups. |
