PSC is a company that provides a broad range of IT services, such as hybrid cloud integration, Web integration, IT outsourcing, IT operations management, and security solutions. Its head office is situated in Tokyo, and it also operates branch offices, sales offices, data centers, and other types of facilities at locations all across Japan, including Osaka and Nagoya, with a workforce of 626 employees (as of April 1, 2020). Since its founding in 1996, the company has been steadily expanding its business. In fiscal year 2020 (ended in March 2020), both sales and operating income posted double-digit growth rates on a year-over-year basis.

The company focuses on reinforcing IT services that support teleworking arrangements and other highly efficient modes of work and provides, as part of this effort, endpoint security solutions comprising six different countermeasures as follows: countermeasures against attacks targeting devices, countermeasures against attacks targeting networks, threat visualization, promotion of cloud computing, access authentication, and the distribution of fragments of confidential data (figure).

Taishi Okano, a director at PSC, explains as follows: “We see these six countermeasures as essential for properly protecting a company’s information assets (confidential information) while it promotes teleworking arrangements. All of these countermeasures are based on technologies whose effectiveness has been verified and confirmed through their use within our company.”

ZENMU Virtual Desktop is used in the distribution of fragments of confidential data, which is one of the six countermeasures provided by the company. Okano outlines how this product came to be adopted: “For us, a company that is active in the security business, being absolutely certain when it comes to security measures implemented internally is literally a management challenge that must be properly addressed. As part of our efforts to strengthen security, we seek to minimize the risk of information leaks from PCs removed from the office as much as possible and have accordingly decided to adopt ZENMU products to go along with fingerprint authentication solutions provided by DDS, Inc. This led to us selling ZENMU Virtual Desktop to external clients.”

PSC used to take such measures as the encryption of disks to help prevent information leaks from PCs removed from the office. However, as original data files remain on a PC’s local disk with the disk encryption approach, the risk that the contents of such files could be read if a PC were stolen or misplaced cannot be completely eliminated.

“For this issue, ZENMU Virtual Desktop renders data files meaningless and splits each file into two fragments, one of which is stored in the cloud. This creates a state in which the original data file does not exist on the PC’s local disk, such that there is no concern that information will be leaked even if a PC were to be stolen or misplaced. We found this advantage to be so persuasive that we decided to adopt it within the company.” (Okano)

At PSC, sales representatives and software engineers are just some of the employees who use PCs removed from the office, the number of which has reached 300. We began to work on installing ZENMU Virtual Desktop on PCs to be removed from the office around October 2019 and finished installing it on all 300 PCs by January 2020. Today, a rule is in place that prohibits the removal of any PC on which ZENMU Virtual Desktop has not been installed from the office.

“Since the process of applying ZENMU Virtual Desktop to PCs is completed just by installing the product on a PC, its deployment requires no effort or time. Moreover, the application of the product does not significantly affect the operations of the PC (Windows 10). Secret sharing is also automatically performed just by storing a data file in the right folder. Thus, daily tasks can be undertaken away from the office by a mobile worker without having to feel out of place.” (Ryuta Sako, ICT Internal Information Systems Promotion Team, PSC, Inc.)

Adopting ZENMU Virtual Desktop allowed the company to be liberated from having to worry about information leaks from PCs removed from the office. Okano explained that when the company transitioned to a teleworking system for some employees as a countermeasure against COVID-19 infections, “We were able to allow our employees to bring company PCs home without having to scramble to implement special measures for this purpose.” He concludes by saying that the company was also able to obtain operational know-how through the internal use of the product.

“Ensuring that no data remains on a work PC is an essential security measure for any teleworking arrangement. ZENMU Virtual Desktop is a groundbreaking solution in that it achieves such an environment at anywhere between one-fifth to one-eighth the cost of a typical DaaS (Desktop as a Service) option. In addition to confirming the effectiveness of this solution through the internal use of this solution, we have obtained know-how on how to achieve both comfort and security for mobile work while figuring out how this product should be used in a way that minimizes the burden on employees in terms of operations and management. This has allowed us to recommend ZENMU Virtual Desktop as an exceptionally economical and safe system for preventing information leaks to our clients with confidence. We also provide DaaS options and believe that, together with the adoption of ZENMU Virtual Desktop, we can now flexibly accommodate the diverse needs of our clients.”