Ricoh Group is a global provider of technology that transforms business processes and information management to help organisations be more agile, productive and profitable. Ricoh is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan with operations in over 200 countries.

Following a series of Wannacry cyber-attacks in 2017 against high-profile companies that led to the disclosure of personal information, senior executives began a strategic project across the Group to implement additional security measures to further strengthen network controls.

“Sales operations and engineers often visit customers and they increasingly need to remotely access company servers,” explains Mr. Hiroyuki Suzuki, director of Security Operations and leader of network management for the Ricoh Group. “In addition, we also anticipate a rapid increase in demand for access via telework and home offices as part of our ongoing Workstyle Innovation programme.”

To provide safe network connectivity for employees, the security operations division reviewed its infrastructure to look at ways it could strengthen its overall security posture. As Mr. Tomotake Wakuri, from the Security Operations Division explains, “We looked at firewall products with built-in VPN features, but when we took the increase in the number of simultaneous connections into consideration, we decided it was better to separate them. As a result, we reached the conclusion that as a leader of the industry, Pulse Secure was appropriate in terms of both performance and capacity.”

Ricoh has deployed Pulse Access Suite Enterprise Edition at data centers in Tokyo and Osaka along with Pulse Secure license servers to aid flexible deployment of security resources. Pulse Access Suite includes Pulse Policy Secure to deliver Network Access Control (NAC) with granular policy enforcement and integrated management capabilities.

The new Pulse Secure VPN and Network Access Control (NAC) solution allows Ricoh to maintain 5,000 simultaneous connections per location to support secure access for 10,000 sales employees and around 4,000 support engineers spread across multiple times zones. The solution includes local host device validation to ensure connecting devices have required OS patches and active anti-malware protection. Through the simplicity and reliability of the Pulse Secure solution, Ricoh has also moved its previously outsourced VPN management and maintenance functions back in-house leading to a 60 percent reduction in its secure network access budget.