The tourism and travel industry runs on data. Businesses in the sector routinely collect substantial amounts of personal information on customers including financial details, passport numbers, addresses, the names and ages of family members, and more. As a result, travel companies are a tempting target for cybercriminals, and many have fallen victim to phishing, ransomware, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in recent years.

Enhancing Endpoint and Email Protection

For one major Australian travel and tourism company, the threats facing the sector meant that when it came time to update its endpoint protection and email security solutions, it wanted the highest levels of defense available.

The company was an established Fortinet customer, and impressed with the performance of its existing Fortinet systems and looking to take advantage of the consolidated and integration abilities of the Fortinet Security Fabric, the company asked Fortinet to propose a cloud-based replacement for its endpoint and email security systems. The company’s criteria for success were that the solution both protect its business and deliver operational efficiencies.

Embracing Zero-trust Network Access

Through a series of demos, the Fortinet team showed the customer that FortiClient can go beyond basic endpoint protection to enable zero-trust network access (ZTNA). Fortinet’s ZTNA solution enables zero trust principles for application access, ensuring users and devices are checked and authenticated prior to access, for every application session.

The demos were so successful that the company selected Fortinet as its partner for both endpoint protection and email security. Today, the company is adding to its Fortinet Security Fabric with 1,500 FortiClient and 1,500 FortiMail licenses.

FortiMail delivers advanced multilayered protection against the full spectrum of email-borne threats. The FortiMail solution is powered by FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence service, which will help the company better protect itself against email-based threats including spam, phishing, malware, zero-day threats, impersonation, and business email compromise (BEC) attacks. The solution included application programming interface (API) support for Microsoft 365.

As part of the solution, the company is also using a variety of AI (artificial intelligence) powered security services from FortiGuard, including Antivirus for automated updates that protect against the latest threats, and URL filtering for granular blocking and filtering for web and video categories.

Efficient and Effective Security

Fortinet has delivered exactly what the company required: the highest levels of security with deep integration and consolidation for operational efficiency. The company had also explicitly asked for a cloud-based solution to further increase operational efficiency, a request that Fortinet was able to honour with an entirely cloud-based solution but also capable of securing on-premises or across any edge.

With FortiClient in place, the company will be able to benefit from replacing its legacy virtual private network (VPN) with a ZTNA environment that enables seamless remote working with high levels of performance while also giving complete control to the security team. Meanwhile, integration across the Fortinet Security Fabric, including the company’s existing Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, will simplify and improve management and reporting across the company’s users and network.