Korn Ferry

, Sep 10, 2014

Logicalis Offers Korn Ferry Benefits of One-Stop Procurement

Korn Ferry

Korn Ferry is a single source for leadership and talent consulting services to empower businesses and leaders to reach their goals. Korn Ferry’s solutions range from executive recruitment and leadership development programs, to enterprise learning, succession planning, and recruitment process outsourcing (RPO).

Korn Ferry operates out of 80 offices with more than 3,500 employees across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

Challenges

Faced with the growing volume of security threats and to better protect against an emerging variety of new threats, in 2013, Korn Ferry decided to upgrade the organisation to a higher level of firewall detection and to centralise a security architecture that covered its network and perimeter equipment across all of its offices in the Asia Pacific.

Korn Ferry was looking for a partner with a regional footprint and who could provide an effective and efficient way of managing the procurement and logistics for the deployment of their new firewall solution in Asia.

“We currently operate in 20 offices across 10 countries in the Asia Pacific. We didn't want the hassle of dealing with multiple parties from various locations and going through different proposals,” said Mr Hebert Lau, IT Director, Asia Pacific at Korn Ferry.

Mr Lau said Korn Ferry selected Logicalis as it had all the right skill sets and satisfied the pre-requisites as a one-stop procurement and single logistics partner for the entire region.

“Another key reason why we chose Logicalis was that the team was always proactive in their monitoring and tracking. Logicalis was flexible and responsive whenever changes in the quotations were requested. We are extremely satisfied with the fast turnaround in their service and support.” he said.

Solution

Korn Ferry had relied on Cisco’s security management solutions for a number of years and Mr Lau said it was an easy decision to go with Cisco’s adaptive security appliance 5512-X next-generation firewalls for the security upgrade.

As a next-generation firewall, the Cisco ASA 5512-X supported multiple security services to enable consistent security enforcement throughout the organisation. The firewall solution was able to combine the visibility from local traffic in each country with in-depth global network intelligence, ensuring that Korn Ferry’s evolving and future needs are met.

In addition to the firewall capabilities, the ASA 5512-X also offered expanded network security options through a number of integrated cloud- and software-based security services, including Application Visibility and Control (AVC) as well as Web Security Essentials (WSE), which restrict web and web application usage based on the reputation of the sites. Downtime and lost productivity on the network are minimised through an added Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) module that ensures all inbound and outbound web traffic is analysed in real time. Malware detection, with signature-based scanning and heuristics analysis, also blocks threats before they can inflict any damage.

Successful Outcomes

Logicalis delivered the order for the Cisco firewall solution across 14 of Korn Ferry’s offices within a span of 12 months. Phase 1 of the delivery started in July 2013 and saw the ASA 5512-X installed in four offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo. Phase 2 started in January 2014 and extended the deployment to another 10 locations in the Asia Pacific, including Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia and China.

Mr Lau said Korn Ferry’s IT staff handled the deployment of the firewall solution in 90% of the offices, with the remaining 10% contracted to third parties. An estimated 900 corporate users in the Asia Pacific now use Korn Ferry’s network to access in-house applications, with many connecting from remote locations using Korn Ferry’s VPN.

Mr Lau added that the new firewall solution’s enhanced security, robustness and end-to-end network intelligence will enable Korn Ferry to continue improving the network, and to explore options such as creating an IT infrastructure to better manage mobile devices in the future.

“IT security plays a crucial role in this success of Korn Ferry, enabling our employees to work productively in the office and remotely. We now have a secure, robust and high-performance network in place and are able to take advantage of newer applications and devices without fears of compromising security. The modular scalability and feature extensibility of the next-generation firewall solution should also offer us long-term benefits of lower deployment and operations costs,” he said.

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