Unigel

Founded in 1966 in São Paulo, Brazil, Unigel is the largest producer of acrylics and styrenics in Latin America. The company produces a diversified portfolio of chemicals, petrochemicals, plastics, and fertilizers and employs 1,300 people. It has two corporate data centers and seven local data centers. Unigel is dedicated to researching and developing its own technologies, seeking the continuous innovation of production processes to increase its competitiveness and reinforce its commitment to environmental preservation.

With nine data centers, Unigel manages the movement of a large volume of data each day—including email, data files, applications, images, and more. The company needed to ensure that it was fully prepared to protect its data and prevent and mitigate cyberattacks. “We have to keep the corporate environment secure, ensuring that our users can exchange information with the outside world without worries. We need to ensure all data that arrives at Unigel is analyzed to avoid data loss and attacks, and not compromise the business,” said Claudia Anania, CIO from Unigel.

Because Unigel operates in a high-security industry, protecting mission-critical information and infrastructure is mandatory. The company must protect both its data and access to operating systems and locations that are potentially valuable to malicious attackers. Compliance requirements for this highly regulated industry are a major priority, requiring Unigel to meet multiple internal and external audit standards. Satisfying these requirements meant that Unigel must always keep its technology current. With the growing proliferation of sophisticated attacks and tightening compliance regulations, the company’s IT leaders were challenged to protect their data while improving the pace at which patches could be implemented, all without overtaxing their internal teams.

Unigel needed a security solution that could guarantee that its assets would be protected against cyberattacks, and it needed those products to easily integrate with the tools the company already possessed. The security solution also needed to be financially viable for the company. Trend Micro solutions met all those requirements.

Trend Micro’s position in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and its exceptional customer support helped cement Unigel’s decision. “Trend Micro has reliable solutions and supports the customer in implementing and maintaining those solutions,” said Claudia Anania. “Gartner, International Data Corporation (IDC), and NSS Labs all recognize Trend Micro as a market leader.”

Unigel implemented Trend Micro™ OfficeScan™ solution in 2007 to enhance its endpoint protection and secure its email. OfficeScan protects Unigel’s endpoints by infusing machine learning into a blend of threat protection techniques to eliminate security gaps across any user activity and any endpoint.

The company later brought in Trend Micro™ Deep Discovery™ solution to identify malicious content and cyber threats. Deep Discovery, powered by XGen™ security, provides Unigel with complete visibility into its network traffic—allowing the company to use sandboxing and advanced analysis to stay ahead of purpose-built attacks that evade out-of-date controls, exploit network vulnerabilities, and steal sensitive data, communications, and intellectual property.

The addition of Trend Micro™ Deep Security™ solution, which includes robust capabilities for physical, virtual, and cloud servers in a single integrated platform, enhanced Unigel’s level of protection for its servers. The solution’s centralized management provides continuous monitoring and vulnerability shielding, and its virtual patching functionality ensures that Unigel’s software is kept up to date with the latest patches—without placing a burden on its IT team.

"Trend Micro OfficeScan improved our IT security efficiency by 90 percent, our compliance by 90 percent, and our incident response by 90 percent."

Claudia Anania
CIO from Unigel

Since Unigel began using OfficeScan in 2007, the company hasn’t experienced a single endpoint incident. OfficeScan also provides the company with greater visibility across the threat landscape. Unigel can see how many attacks the solutions have identified and stopped each month. “The Deep Security virtual patching capability is extremely importance because we do not have enough people to apply the patches whenever they are released by the manufacturers.” Claudia Anania, CIO from Unigel,” said Claudia Anania.

Since the deployment of Deep Security across the server environment, Unigel IT leaders are more confident that their operating systems are protected from vulnerabilities. The virtual patch feature is a critical component of that, given Unigel’s small IT staff. “The Deep Security virtual patching capability is extremely importance because we do not have enough people to apply the patches whenever they are released by the manufacturers,” said Claudia Anania.

Deep Discovery is now deployed on every location, behind the firewall and mirroring the core switch ports for the company. Because of the tremendous amount of data moving through the company every day, Unigel especially values the ability of Deep Discovery to monitor the lateral movement of data across its networks.

The combination of these Trend Micro solutions reassures da Silva and her team that their organization is well-protected. “We have several Trend Micro solutions,” she said. “The fact that they are integrated assures us that the whole environment is secure and that the tools will act cohesively in the face of threats.”

"We have several Trend Micro solutions. The fact that they are integrated assures us that the whole environment is secure and that the tools will act cohesively in the face of threats."

Claudia Anania
CIO from Unigel

As the company grows and the threat landscape evolves, Claudia Anania plans to continue improving Unigel’s security posture by implementing additional Trend Micro solutions. “In the near future,” she said, “We intend to implement Trend Micro Data Loss Protection™, Trend Micro Mobile Security™, and Trend Micro™ Deep Discovery™ Email Inspector.”