NIFCLOUD
NIFCLOUD REDUCES CUSTOMER INQUIRIES, INCREASES THREAT DETECTION RATE WITH VADE
From left
Fujitsu Cloud Technologies: Sales Architect Headquarters, Digital Solutions Department Senior Manager Ryosuke Ashida, Cloud Platform Headquarters
NIFCLOUD (formerly Nifty Cloud) is a domestic public cloud service based on VMware. With more than 7,000 customers, NIFCLOUD is a leading ISP in Japan that delivers infrastructure and digital business products and services, including hosting, networking, storage, and email.
THE CHALLENGE
Currently, spam email accounts for about 40 percent of the domestic emails handled by domestic ISPs. Many of the cyberattacks in recent years have used email as an entry point. To maintain security for thousands of customers, preventing spam is critical.
NIFCLOUD Business Mail, the business email service provided by Fujitsu Cloud Technologies, has provided a spam filtering function since its inception in 2010. However, as spam emails have become increasingly sophisticated, there has been an increase in spam emails that bypass the filter or are not detected, leading to an increase in inquiries from customers.
“Once or twice a year we had to go directly to a customer site to explain the cause of a big problem that had occurred and the measures we were taking to correct it,” said Ryuichi Kurino, Cloud Platform SRE Department Manager. “In those situations, we felt the limitations of the signature matching detection we were using at the time. Around that time, we learned of Vade and starting looking into services that filtered spam emails with heuristic detection methods.”
Fujitsu Cloud Technologies Cloud Platform Headquarters Platform SRE Department
Additionally, Fujitsu Cloud Technologies has a strong commitment to support for its customers, and a major characteristic of NIFCLOUD is the fast response time to inquiries. However, few companies can respond to inquiries with the speed that NIFCLOUD demands, and getting technical support in Japanese presented a challenge.
THE SOLUTION
At the time, there were few heuristic-style filtering services that could link to the cloud, including NIFCLOUD Business Mail. Of those services, several candidates were selected, and their detection rates and performance tests were verified. After reviewing the findings, Vade was selected.
The Vade filter has different settings based on a customer’s risk tolerance: a strict setting that won’t allow even one suspicious email to pass through, and a tolerant setting that focuses on the business risk of an email being misclassified as spam.
For example, departments dealing with personal information and corporate secrets should use a stricter setting, while departments that have many external interactions, such as personnel and sales, should have a more tolerant setting.
Platform SRE Department Manager, Yuhei Miura
In the future, more detailed settings based on the work and security risk of each department will be required.
“Currently, there is no function for detailed setting of the filter,” said Kurino. “However, I have heard this is possible using the additional functions of Vade. For this reason, I am thinking of adding the filter setting function and making it easier to use.”
RESULTS
NIFCLOUD deployed Vade in May 2018. A year later, the number of inquiries from customers has been drastically reduced. “The detection rate is 1.5 times what it used to be,” said Kurino. “The reason we chose Vade was its high rate of detection, supported by actual results,” said Kurino. “It also outperformed other candidates in the cost department. And the support team was able to work with us. This was a very big point.”
“The previous filtering service that we used responded slowly to inquiries, and the answers to questions were often in English,” Kurino said. “But everyone at Vade responds quickly, even to urgent inquiries, and their answers are at a level of Japanese that is good enough that we can just pass them to the customers as-is, which is very helpful.”
When issues occur, customers want to know the cause, said Yuhei Miura of Fujitsu Cloud Technologies, Cloud Platform Department Manager. “With the service we previously used, we were never given much information, including, for example, reasons for judgment, such as why something was detected, so we were unable to give the customers a detailed reason. With Vade,” Miura said, “we have that information.”
I am confident that with Vade, we are able to provide much higher security when compared to other similar services.
WHY NIFCLOUD CHOSE VADE
- High detection rate
- Measurable results
- Support response
More Case Studies
SMX
Partnering with Vade improved phishing catch rates and helped to evolve the SMX product line.
Bazar Solutions, Inc.
To protect his Microsoft 365 clients, Bazar was running an email gateway that features encryption, but because the gateway architecture sits outside Microsoft 365, it created challenges in customer environments.
