ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) is Japan’s leading system integrator, serving a wide range of industries such as information and telecommunications, finance, distribution, and manufacturing. CTC provides its clients with IT solutions and strong support throughout the IT lifecycle, from consulting to infrastructure building, system development, and maintenance and operation. With more than 7,200 employees group- wide (as of April, 2011) and deep technology skills, CTC serves all categories of business customers through branch and sales offices, data centers, verification centers, and other facilities in about 100 locations all over Japan.

Since its founding, CTC has worked hard to strengthen its relations with advanced IT companies overseas. Through its strong relations with these advanced companies, CTC has been able to take a leadership position with the latest IT trends. CTC aims to expand its business by following the major trend toward shifting from “ownership” to “utilization” and strengthening its position in the cloud computing sector as the next important pillar.

Considering CTC’s role as an IT solution provider, the Internet is an essential part of its service infrastructure. In other words, a safe and secure Internet environment is critical for the company’s success. With the Blue Coat Secure Web Gateway solution, CTC improved its Internet access performance and implemented URL filtering, thus optimizing its web security.

Enhance Web Security and Improve Performance

CTC and its ten affiliates have built a wide-area, Ethernet-based network. Today, about 100 sites, including branch and sales offices, data centers, and verification facilities in Tokyo and all over Japan, are integrated into a single enterprise network, with Internet access and other external connections routed through the headquarters. CTC had been using proxies for Internet access, but the increased availability requirements of web mail, online storage, and other convenient online services increased the risk of security breaches and information disclosure. This forced the company to further enhance its security.

In addition, a higher concentration of web access could degrade the response time. The company had to find a way to remedy the situation. CTC chose to deploy Blue Coat ProxySG appliances to accelerate its Internet access with web caching, while using Blue Coat’s WebFilter with the WebPulse collaborative cloud defense service to analyze and categorize unknown content and links. The company has implemented advanced security measures such as filtering.

“In 2006, we started to study measures for enhancing our web security. We wanted to implement appliances that offered a low operational burden,” said Mr. Takamichi Sugawara of the CTC Information Systems Department. “We deployed Blue Coat ProxySG appliances and used them with a third-party web filtering solution. Then the number of employees doubled due to a large-scale merger in October 2006. So we added more Blue Coat ProxySG appliances to further speed up our Internet access.”

In 2011, the company replaced its older Blue Coat ProxySG appliances with the latest models. At the same time, it switched from the third-party filtering solution, which imposed a high operational burden, to Blue Coat WebFilter software. This enabled CTC to implement strong web security while reducing the operational burden through advanced filtering policies. Today, a load balancer at a higher level distributes traffic to four Blue Coat ProxySG appliances to optimize performance while achieving security policy compliance.

Simplify Operations

With CTC’s previous third-party filtering solution, many Japanese websites were not categorized because it had a low degree of precision. According to CTC security policy, a warning is displayed when a user accesses an uncategorized website, and login access is blocked by restricting posting. Although users could request that such websites be added to the white list, processing requests and registering websites on the white list placed a heavy burden on the IT department. “We needed a new filtering system that could implement security policies while reducing the operational burden,” said Mr. Hitoshi Okano, Manager of the Information Systems Department, looking back on those days. CTC chose Blue Coat WebFilter.

Blue Coat WebFilter blocks malware and filters out inappropriate content based on CTC’s Internet security policies. It provides advanced, powerful defense against fast-spreading threats, and can block botnets and spyware from calling home. Blue Coat WebFilter supports over 55 languages, and keeps up with user ratings on millions of websites and billions of web pages classified into 84 categories. CTC uses Blue Coat’s WebFilter and its WebPulse cloud defense to provide real-time web protection and ratings anywhere in the world or on its networks.

“Previously, 20 percent of websites were not categorized. Blue Coat WebFilter has decreased uncategorized websites to six percent. It has significantly reduced the necessity for employees to apply for registration, and hence reduced our operational burden,” said Mr. Hitoshi Senbokuya, General Manager of the Information Systems Department.

When an employee accesses an uncategorized website, a warning is issued and the employee is prohibited from posting information. But too many uncategorized websites can lead to problems. For example, if a new page is created on a major membership website, the employee may suddenly become unable to log on to the website. In this case, the rules require the information systems department to add the website manually to the white list as well as ask the vendor to rerate the site. “Previously it took a few days from when we asked for the site to be rerated until we received a response. When we evaluated Blue Coat WebFilter, we asked for various patterns to be rerated, such as overnight or holiday patterns, and we almost always received a response within a single business day. This rapid response and high level of efficiency convinced us that Blue Coat WebFilter is just what we need to accelerate our business operations.”

Blue Coat WebFilter features the WebPulse collaborative cloud defense, which analyzes and categorizes unknown content and links. WebPulse gathers information on emerging web content and websites from more than 75 million users in real time. As a result, it covers more web content than any single organization. This service immediately analyzes new content based on over 300 web rating libraries and real-time threat analysis. It also combines real-time threat and background process analysis, proactive web analysis, third-party feedback and manual evaluation for sandboxing, script analysis, phone-home detection and full link analysis.

In addition, CTC now uses Blue Coat Reporter, which visualizes user activity to enable prompt analysis when failures and other critical situations arise. The Reporter dashboard provides detailed views of user activity. The company deployed servers for both logging and analysis to ensure smooth analysis by Blue Coat Reporter. In daily operations, it generates graphical reports of web access utilization, and shares the top accessed websites with employees via its portal in an effort to reduce Internet traffic.

Stronger Security, Increased Productivity

As one of Japan’s leading systems integrators, CTC offers advanced IT solutions to all categories of business. Using the Blue Coat Secure Web Gateway Solution, CTC ensures company-wide compliance with strong security policies while reducing the operational burden on its information system department. As a result, it has increased its employee productivity while at the same time strengthening its security.