Strengthening hybrid IT secure access at leading Italian publishing house

Pulse Secure has delivered a successful project at one of Italy’s largest media organisations designed to help foster mobile workforce productivity while ensuring protected, compliant access to cloud and data centre applications. 

 

RCS MediaGroup is one of the leading multimedia publishing groups, active mainly in Italy and Spain across all publishing fields, spanning from newspapers to magazines, from digital to books, from TV to new media, and to training. It is also one of the top players in the advertising market and in the organisation of iconic events and major sporting formats, such as the Giro d’Italia.

 

The RCS Group publishes the daily newspapers Corriere della Sera, La Gazzetta dello Sport, El Mundo, Marca and Expansion, as well as numerous magazines, the most popular including Oggi, Amica, Io Donna, 7, YO Dona and Telva. Like many other popular enterprises, being an integral part region’s culture and communications has made RCS Group a target for cyber threat actors.

 

“Protecting our systems against cyber-attack is a critical requirement as is ensuring our staff and journalists have easy, flexible and secure access to their work,” says Monica Venanzetti, Network Manager for RCS MediaGroup in Milan. “To meet this need, we maintain several security controls across our network, as well as regularly conduct cyber-security training. We deployed our first VPN solution in 2006 to enable secure access to our systems and it was time to progress our capabilities.”

 

RCS MediaGroup employs over 3,000 staff including 700 journalists and as Giandomenico Oldano, Director of IT operations for RCS MediaGroup, explains, “As a group, we have an ongoing strategy to help our staff embrace smart working. This is part of an initiative to improve the work-life balance of our employees and reduce their traveling time, which in a busy city like Milan can be very time consuming.”

 

As part of this work-life balance strategy, RCS MediaGroup has invested in more remote, mobile and cloud technologies and recently moved its staff onto Microsoft Office 365 to encourage this transition.

 

“To meet this need and as part of our commitment to ensuring best practice secure access, we decided to upgrade our legacy VPN to provide more capacity and to better integrate with new cloud services such as Office 365,” says Venanzetti. “We examined several options and Pulse Secure provided us a modernized platform with more advanced features including endpoint compliance and cloud single-sign on. We found the tool comparatively simpler to administer, very interoperable and with a broader feature-set.”

 

The upgrade process was straightforward, and the simplified management interface allows RCS MediaGroup to set up enterprise-wide policies that make it easy for its remote users to connect to its critical publishing systems. The solution also incorporates client checking technology that ensures that its users’ devices, both corporate and personally owned endpoints, are running the right system and security patches before they can attach to the corporate network.

 

“One of the most important features was deep support for our users’ devices including tablets, laptops and PCs across both Apple and Microsoft environments,” says Oldano. “Our upgrade has been a success and provides a lot of potential for future projects that will allow us to offer secure access for more cloud-based applications. Pulse Secure has been with us throughout this process and its technology is helping us to deliver on our commitment towards smarter working for all our staff.”

 

Pulse Secure enables enterprises to centrally manage Zero Trust Secure Access to applications, resources and services that are delivered on-premise, in private cloud and public cloud environments. The Pulse Access Suite delivers protected connectivity, operational intelligence and threat response across mobile, network and multi-cloud environments in order to provide easy, compliant access for end users and single-pane-of-glass management for administrators.

 

“Enterprises are fortifying capabilities to accelerate mobile workforce productivity and take advantage of cloud computing. Pulse Secure offers a proven, comprehensive and integrated suite that works with an enterprises hybrid IT infrastructure to enable a simpler, more manageable and scalable approach to secure access,” said Paul Donovan, vice president of EMEA sales at Pulse Secure. “We are pleased to have been selected by RCS MediaGroup, a prominent and progressive market leader in multimedia publishing and look forward to supporting their on-going digital transformation initiatives.”