House of HR Streamlines Its M&A Processes with Netskope

House of HR’s IT team delivers a range of services to the group’s approximately 50 companies and 7,800 users, including cybersecurity solutions. The group pursues a dynamic mergers and acquisitions (M&A)-based growth strategy and views its cloud-first digital services and a scalable cybersecurity platform as vital enablers for onboarding new companies and helping them thrive.

Ben Van Goethem, IT Director at House of HR, comments: “Our IT team is a centralized service provider for our businesses, and we aim to be as flexible as possible. That said, given the importance of security, there are some mandatory, group-level requirements that all our businesses must follow, especially when it comes to protecting our data.”

Four years ago, House of HR installed a competitive secure web gateway (SWG) to help enforce company policies and filter web traffic. However, the SWG solution proved inflexible to the company’s evolving needs and therefore it decided to explore other alternatives.

“We looked at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and saw that Netskope was a leader in the security service edge [SSE] market, “says Karel Hillewaere, Information Security Manager at House of HR. “In addition, we learned that Netskope was a business partner with Microsoft, which further enhanced our confidence that Netskope could deliver against our business needs and those of our companies.”

Following extensive testing of the Netskope Next Gen SWG, House of HR was satisfied that it could provide the levels of control and usability it required.

The Netskope Next Gen SWG provides a flexible, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) foundation for SSE web and cloud inline security uniting SWG and cloud access security broker (CASB) solutions, inclusive of threat protection, analytics, and data protection. This latter feature was important to House of HR. “In addition to the SWG and CASB, we wanted to improve our data loss prevention [DLP] capability. Unlike other vendors, Netskope provides over 3,000 data identifiers and supports 1,800+ file types as standard DLP features of its Next Gen SWG, so we don’t need to pay for add-ons or additional licenses,” says Hillewaere.

The Netskope implementation was completed using Microsoft Intune, a cloud-based unified endpoint management service. The company also implemented the Next Gen SWG in its Azure Virtual Desktop environment, so that outbound traffic must now flow through the Netskope solution, blocking machine traffic service accounts that have not been allowlisted, and helping to protect the company’s internal environment.

In just two months, the IT team installed the Netskope Next Gen SWG for approximately 95% of users (7,500 employees). “This is a significant achievement given the complexity of implementation across 50 different companies, and testament to the high levels of collaboration and partnership we have achieved with Netskope at this stage of the project,” says Van Goethem.

Netskope’s SaaS solution, powered by Netskope NewEdge, the world’s largest private secure access service edge cloud, provides the flexibility that House of HR requires for its M&A activity. “It’s important that we have a partner that believes in our growth and wants to grow with us,” says Van Goethem. “Netskope embraces this approach, and it’s one of the main reasons we selected the company. That, and the high levels of trust we built over the solution testing period.”

With its Next Gen SWG in place, the IT team can apply the levels of control it needs to protect its systems and data. Van Goethem provides an example: “With Netskope we can denylist web content that is inappropriate, unsafe, or unsuitable. As well as improving our security posture, this helps with compliance.”

Van Goethem also cites Netskope’s SSL inspection capabilities as a key benefit, helping it to identify security threats that might otherwise be hidden. The data provided by the Next Gen SWG is also beneficial when investigating security incidents.

The IT team uses the analytics generated by the Netskope solution to provide intelligence to its “PowerHouse” users. “The leaked credentials page is particularly helpful,” says Hillewaere. “We can share this with our businesses so they can inform their employees to reset their passwords.”

With Netskope, House of HR benefits from an intuitive system that saves time and effort while providing a scalable security solution that will help support future growth. As a result, it can quickly bring on new companies with a great user experience, while reducing troubleshooting networking issues.