Municipality of Milan

Overview

With a focus on more effective security strategies, the Municipality of Milan chose Forcepoint security solutions to protect its network from potential Web threats.

Challenge

It is still quite common among Italian organizations to face controversial attitudes regarding information security. In fact, it usually takes until the aftermath of an attack to raise the level of awareness and generate remedial actions, encouraging better strategies for prevention.

Nonetheless, organizations are aligning their security vision to a continuous process focused on the defense against increasingly sophisticated attacks or Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). One of those organizations is the Municipality of Milan, which has developed an infrastructure based on different levels of protection: 

“Over the last two years we have detected more and more sophisticated attacks so we formed a team dedicated to monitoring the evolution of these attacks while researching protection techniques. We have also leveraged heavy-traffic opportunities such as Expo 2015 to improve infrastructure and tests, developing more effective prevention strategies.”
— Guido Albertini, Central Director of Information Systems and Digital agenda, Municipality of Milan

In the face of an international event, Expo 2015 (the World’s Fair), which consisted of more than 20 million visitors and 5,000 events held over 184 days, Milan required a dependable security infrastructure. This convinced its IT Department to coordinate a defensive strategy, which involved the ecosystem of controlled organizations and the collaboration of Postal Police and the CNAIPIC (National Crime Center for Critical Infrastructure Protection) bureau. 

Beyond the spectacle of an event like Expo 2015, security issues also affect day to day city administration and its innovation processes that, in recent years, have mainly focused on online services:

“The portal system access for residents and institutions has been completely redesigned. This was a concern for not only graphic aspects, but the underlying infrastructure, which also required security investments to reduce the risk of DDoS attacks or defacement.”
— Albertini

Solution

The Municipality of Milan adopted a reliable web security solution, choosing Forcepoint Web Security, which provides complete, real-time protection against APTs by leveraging the classification characteristics of the Forcepoint Advanced Classification Engine (ACE): 

“We made the decision based off of important parameters, such as the machine throughput, the positioning on the market and the quality of a classification database. The Forcepoint solution helps us to block real-time traffic directed to malicious sites and effectively manage our filtering policies. Not only does this meet our security parameters, but it addresses the browsing needs of our end-users.”
— Albertini

Results

The Municipality of Milan deployed its Forcepoint solution in partnership with its telecommunications network outsourcer, but utilizes continuous technical collaboration with Forcepoint. The Municipality has appreciated the Forcepoint Web Security solution because it provides a high level of security without decreasing productivity:

“The deployment of Forcepoint was completely transparent for our users, making them aware that Web browsing activities are safer without inconveniencing their work.”
— Albertini

Looking forward

The Municipality of Milan is currently planning the future creation of a dedicated structure for all administrative security aspects, both physical and logical. More focus is also being allocated to application protection and cloud services.