Check Point Software Technologies has announced that Clarks, a global shoe company, has overhauled its complete cybersecurity posture to a consolidated approach with Check Point Infinity Unified Management, Harmony, Quantum and CloudGuard solutions.

According to the company, this was especially important during the pandemic when Clarks had to rapidly scale up security to seamless VPN access to corporate networks and resources, as people began working from home. Check Point states that Clarks was able to improve security, gain better visibility and simplify management, while saving costs by eliminating several other vendor solutions.

Clarks is a global shoe manufacturing and retail company with more than 1,400 stores in 75 countries. With a complex IT network across manufacturing, distribution, retail, and the ever-increasing rise in cyber crime, Clarks needed to take a proactive approach to secure its networks against the next generation of cyber attacks.

Previously, the complexity of management across multiple solutions had made maintaining and managing policies significantly more difficult. When a new in-house IT team came on board, Clarks adopted a consolidated end-to-end strategy with Check Point Software’s Infinity architecture for more robust security functionality, simplified management, and improved visibility over its security architecture.

Dan Fletcher, Network Service Manager at Clarks, says, "We already had a great relationship with Check Point Software, and that made our decision easy. We opted for Check Point Quantum Security Gateways as they allow us to consolidate and simplify our security operations. We now have increased the overall level of protection, while also reducing the work needed to manage security policies and rules by more than 50%.”

Paul Davey, Infrastructure Service Specialist at Clarks, says, "The URL filtering has been especially useful. It detects and prevents web access security events, and SSL inspection technology scans and secures SSL/TLS encrypted traffic. As a result, we were able to eliminate seven internet proxies we were using around the world."

Ian Porteous, Regional Director, Security Engineering, UK&I at Check Point Software, also commented on the project. He says, “It’s fantastic to see that Clarks has chosen our solutions for its security overhaul, gaining not just simplified management and better threat prevention and visibility, but improved cost efficiencies too.

“Clarks' infrastructure now has state-of-the-art protection against known and unknown cyber attacks and threats, and the automated security functions that will reduce the time to identify and remediate threats, allowing the team to make decisions more quickly and efficiently.”

Check Point Software consolidated Clarks’ security infrastructure to provide automated defences across its organisation. Clarks also gained full protection against all kinds of cyber attacks, even the most sophisticated fifth generation (Gen V) attacks that are multi-vector.

The Check Point Software solutions that the company deployed included:

Seven Check Point Quantum Security Gateway clusters defend the company’s global footprint and provide scalable protection against Gen V cyber attacks. The advanced threat prevention technologies included firewall, IPS, Anti-Bot, Antivirus, Application Control, and URL Filtering. As the pandemic unfolded, Quantum remote access VPN made it easy for the team to quickly and securely connect 600 remote users per day (the previous system only allowed for 200 users in total.)

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security to secure cloud-based solutions. Check Point’s advanced threat protection and single-pane-of-glass management enables Clarks to ensure consistent, comprehensive security protections across its estate. The Check Point team used CloudGuard Network Security to set up a virtual hub in Azure, providing secure connectivity between the data centre and cloud.

Check Point Infinity Unified Management to provide unified visibility of Clarks’ entire network environment - enabling flexible policy management, enterprise-wide configuration and deployment, and consolidation. Furthermore, multiple security administrators can modify policies simultaneously for efficient and agile policy management.

Check Point Harmony Endpoint for complete endpoint protection and automated attack detection and remediation (EDR). Harmony Endpoint handles URL filtering on the endpoint, giving users much better performance while Check Point Zero-Phishing, AI-based technology identifies and blocks phishing in real time.

Check Point Quantum SmartEvent event management to provide full threat visibility with a single view into security risks. Including real-time forensics, event investigation, compliance, and reporting.

Check Point Quantum Compliance to continuously monitor a company’s network security compliance with regulations and security best practices.