Hindustan Petroleum Deploys Trend Micro Comprehensive Security Solution

Trend Micro Incorporated recently deployed Comprehensive Security Solutions for Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL), one of India’s largest oil and natural gas companies. Headquartered in Mumbai, the state-owned firm is the most respected organisations in the country.

HPCL’s data was shielded by a thin layer of anti-virus software and lacked a centralised management and monitoring component to keep track of updates and vulnerabilities. Another challenge was that users weren’t able to download security updates directly from the Internet. Worse, many of HPCL’s employees did not have Internet connection at all times. As a result, many user machines were getting outdated when it came to security updates. Apart from malware attacks, this was also resulting in productivity losses for HPCL. Its helpdesk team was the busiest team in the company, as it used to receive numerous calls in a day.

“The solution we had was not comprehensive. It was protecting us only at the client level. But there was no protection at the network level. There were times when, for instance, we could not connect a freshly formatted laptop onto the network without getting infected by a virus. We realised that having AV software on all the clients was not sufficient. Also, monitoring and patching was not happening effectively,” says M.P. Keshava, chief manager-Information Security and Compliance, HPCL. “There were many instances of PCs getting re-formatted because the AV software did not work properly. When we studied the scenario, we realised that it was mainly because the users were not updating their antivirus software regularly,” added Keshava.

On top of that, HPCL had an extensively distributed network with multiple locations across the country. Central management and monitoring, thus, became the need of the hour for the company.

HPCL decided to re-look the security measures it had earlier adopted. Along with an antivirus solution, it wanted to implement e-mail scanning and Web scanning solutions at the gateway level. As the security team was brooding over the need to spruce up the company’s security measures, its existing vendor got acquired. “It got us exploring other options in the market. We evaluated multiple solutions and finally went in for the one proposed by Trend Micro,” says Keshava.

“HPCL implemented our enterprise management dashboard, which tracks security performance, reports malware events, and also helps HPCL in setting threat policies, increasing visibility across the enterprise, and improving compliance. Our solution also helped HPCL in tightening its security policies,” said Dhanya Thakkar, Managing Director, India & SAARC, Trend Micro.

Along with Trend Micro’s office scan antivirus suite, HPCL opted for the vendor’s InterScan Mail security and InterScan Web security solutions, which provided sufficient gateway security for the company. For centralised management, HPCL also implemented Trend Micro Control Manager, an enterprise management dashboard, which tracks security performance, reports malware events, and also helps HPCL in setting threat policies, increasing visibility across the enterprise, and improving compliance.

“Though we have not measured it scientifically, we are experiencing immense gain in productivity, as we now hardly see an employee’s machine conking off because of a virus infection. If reduction in help desk calls is a direct measurement of productivity, then I would say that productivity has gone up by 50 percent,” adds Keshava.

The AV suite, since the implementation, has evolved to become a complete end-point security solution. Apart from its ability to optimise the resource footprint, the solution has helped Keshava stay within the confines of the IT budget of the company. As the next step, HPCL has implemented Trend Micro’s Deep Security for its virtualised environment. This works at the hypervisor level and eliminates the need for individual end-point protection clients in each of the guest machines, thus saving both CPU cycles and memory. With the track record of Trend Micro, Keshava’s team is expecting to reap rich benefits from this solution.