Marcegaglia

Overview

Marcegaglia is the leading steel processing company in the world. Global operations include 7,000 employees, 60 commercial units, 210 representations, and 43 factories spread over a total area of 6 million square meters. Each year, it processes more than 5 million tons of steel and produces 5,500 kilometers of stainless steel and carbon steel products daily for over 15,000 customers. The Marcegaglia family founded the company in 1959 and is headquartered in Gazoldo degli Ippoliti (Mantova), Italy.

Challenge

Marcegaglia’s business and continued dominance in the industry depend on protecting the integrity of the company’s technology and data — not only to support the activities of production and global strategies — but also to ensure the productivity and safety of its staff. Doing so has been a challenge. Currently, the company employs about 2,000 licensed users with personal accounts and email addresses.

In 2008, Renzo Rossi, CTO of Marcegaglia, began looking for a more efficient and secure means for thousands of users to access Web content safely.

“We quickly realized that the Internet represented a good opportunity for growth, but was also a risk if access was not done safely and efficiently.”
— Rossi

Rossi recognized the need for a more efficient navigation process company-wide while protecting employees and data in real time, implementing and improving internal technology hand-in-hand with the development of the risks of the network.

“With the technologies adopted earlier, we had a high number of false positives, or sites that were blocked without a concrete reason. The experience gained over the years has led us to become more aware of the need to use a tool that would prevent access to potentially harmful sites without affecting the productivity of the employees online.”
— Rossi

Solution

In 2008, Marcegaglia installed Forcepoint Web Security solution. This decision stemmed from extensive research and after testing alternative solutions. Marcegaglia took the opportunity to test the features of the Forcepoint Web solution, which made the decision an easy one:

“We already knew that Forcepoint was the market leader in this sector, but in this way we could understand the results that would be obtained before going into production.”
— Rossi

Part of the Forcepoint Web Security solution was Forcepoint’s cloud intelligence, which provides real-time threat analysis. This introduced an advanced level of threat control and protection to Marcegaglia’s critical data, providing industry-leading defense against advanced malware, blended threats and spam.

This positive first experience was a key factor when Marcegaglia decided to upgrade and extend protection to corporate email accounts as well. It chose Forcepoint Email Security for its ability to isolate suspicious links embedded in emails and analyze the destination as soon as a user attempts to open them from any device.

“Using Forcepoint Email Security Cloud enabled us to cope more effectively with more frequent and targeted phishing attacks.”
— Reno Rossi

Marcegaglia values the relationship with its staff and employees and has always promoted the use of new technology, such as email and social media. It does, however, see the crucial need to remain a step ahead of new technology with improved security solutions to defend against an evolving threat landscape, particularly in the Web and email channels. Adding Forcepoint Web and Email Security solutions has been critical in protecting against data theft as well as preparing the ground for future developments in user safety and the security of the network as a whole.

“Proper risk assessment should move from the integration of a complete analysis of the infrastructure to greater user awareness. We are facing this transition with a gradual internal reorganization and a training program to prepare for future changes of the network by leveraging Forcepoint technology.”
— Rossi

Results

According to Rossi, the implementation of the Forcepoint solution has been very successful. One immediate result was a drastic reduction in the number of false positives, resulting in fewer calls to the Help Desk and lowering risk. Another positive result has been the ability for Rossi to more effectively leverage his IT team.

“The task of categorizing blocked sites, creating exceptions or restoring emails stopped by mistakes, can take a long time. Now, however, the support staff can devote their time to more strategic activities.”
— Rossi

Rossi recognizes that allowing employees to use social media as a business tool can be a tricky task for any company. However, he found that by securing Marcegaglia’s data with Forcepoint Web and Email Security, his employees have more freedom and security with online navigation. This, in turn, has increased employee productivity by facilitating the development of innovative user processing.

By deploying Forcepoint, Rossi has been able to set highly granular rules for Web use and accomplished this while still maintaining the level of freedom requested by the company for the use of social networks.

“We particularly liked the option of setting a timeframe which allows users free navigation, for example, in lunch breaks.”
— Rossi

The contributions that Forcepoint has made to Marcegaglia’s operations, employee relations and data security can hardly be overstated: The world leader in steel processing has secured its Web browsing from data theft, minimized false positives, defended its employees from targeted phishing attempts, raised the efficiency of its IT team, and improved employee productivity.

Marcegaglia has relied on Forcepoint data security solutions since 2010.