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A big transition
For over 75 years, Vebego has been providing cleaning and facilities services in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland, capturing a leading share of the market. Building off their strong reputation, Vebego has a unique combination of economic and social values focusing on a people sustainability model. This model allows Vebego to provide employees with continuing education, to install a debt prevention program, and to hire more than 6,000 people who otherwise would have a distance to the labor market.
After working with the local Microsoft account manager, Vebego decided that the best path was to move from its Citrix/Windows 7 solution to a modern workplace with Microsoft 365 E5. Vebego needed a supporting partner to work through the transition – one that could help understand and address all the implications of widespread system change and define actions to be taken along the way. Vebego wanted a partner that would not only help to protect its environment but also to actively take care of detecting and responding to security incidents since the existing solution wasn’t suitable for a cloud-native environment.
Advanced security through Microsoft 365
Vebego turned to InSpark for help regarding implementing a modern workplace migration. Together with Microsoft, InSpark showed Vebego that the Microsoft 365 E5 Security Suite was the best approach to not only protect users but also to help detect and respond to threats on a 24/7 basis. This gave InSpark a natural opportunity to offer its Cloud Security Center managed security solution and illustrate how it was as safe, if not safer, than Vebego’s current competing solution. In just three months from the initial agreement, all Microsoft 365 E5 security functionality was deployed and used by the organization.
Benefits of standardization underlie the Cloud Security Center
With hundreds of engagements on Microsoft security services features in the last few years, InSpark would routinely work on a project-based approach to secure a customer, only to find that twelve months later the customer needed additional support. The IT or security department just couldn’t keep up with the evolving threat landscape, latest security trends, the volume of alerts, and features required to build an effective cybersecurity defense. In response, the InSpark Cloud Security Center was developed using an Intune automation engine for highly standardized policies with broad applicability. The designs are directly suitable for most customers, which helps minimize initial consulting hours. According to Stefan Daelemans, CTO at InSpark, they needed to do more:
“If we wanted to deliver security on the Microsoft cloud platform in the correct way, we had to offer managed security services. To continuously evaluate and update our customers’ protection baseline in a scalable way, we needed to standardize our offering and automate the roll-out.”
In Vebego’s case, InSpark was given the mandate to ensure the environment was as secure as possible.
Empowering actions to keep customers safe
In addition to protection, detection and response capabilities are also critical. InSpark uses the full Microsoft Graph Security API to make sure incidents are followed up in a timely and correct way. It receives security incidents and alerts from all the different services in Microsoft 365 E5, including Cloud App Security, Azure Information Protection, Azure ATP, and Defender ATP. “The Microsoft Graph Security API was a really crucial element in actually building this multi-tenant, scalable managed security solution. Without that, it wouldn’t have been possible,” explained Daelemans. When rolling out new environments, InSpark wants to maximize Secure Score, so it built IP into its Cloud Security Center solution that reads and tracks a customer’s security score. InSpark uses this automated vulnerability scan assessment functionality to gain insights into how that customer’s security is developing over time. “We try to make all the information that is being provided by the Graph Security API as actionable as possible. The IP that we built into our solution actually makes all the signals that are coming from all the various products very actionable by showing changes over time compared to the agreed security baseline,” said Daelemans.
The same pricing structure as Microsoft
Customers are responding well to the growing maturity of InSpark’s managed security services. In addition to the quick delivery speed, customers like InSpark’s pricing strategy. Unlike traditional security providers with expensive and complicated pricing per data source or event, InSpark follows the same familiar pricing structure as Microsoft. InSpark offers its managed services without project costs or expensive setup fees, instead opting for pricing-per-user or device-per-month, including 24/7 detection & respond services. Customers prefer transparency about what security is going to cost them.
