Robert E. Harris Insurance Prevents Data Exfiltration with BlackFog

As a small organization Robert E. Harris Insurance outsources their IT requirements to Managed Service Provider (MSP) ConnectCore. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic the organization had already been transitioning to a more remote working model which highlighted the need for increased security across all devices. With the majority of the company now working remotely across 20 locations and an overall increase in potential attacks including phishing campaigns and ransomware, combined with a move to more cloud based systems, the challenge of how to manage data access and monitor data leaving the network was brought to the forefront.

“We noticed an overall increase in the amount of much more sophisticated phishing emails raising our concern for direct attacks including ransomware. ” Commented Jeremy Sparks, Owner at ConnectCore, responsible for IT at Robert E. Harris Insurance. “Ransomware used to be all about encrypting the data but now it’s more about accessing information like user policies and exfiltrating the data for extortion which makes ransomware more of a compliance issue. To secure ourselves and our client data we really wanted a solution that could monitor and prevent data exfiltration and provide visibility into what was leaving the network.”

Robert E. Harris learned about BlackFog from their Cyber Insurance partner Evolve MGA. “We knew we wanted to be able to monitor data exfiltration but as a small company it can be challenging to add more tools and add additional security layers”, commented Jeremy. “We were a little skeptical that BlackFog would be the missing piece but we really wanted some insight into what was going on in the network so we decided to proceed with a trial and assessment.

The team at Robert E. Harris and ConnectCore were introduced to BlackFog’s VP of Threat Intelligence who provided an overview and demo of the solution prior to starting the ransomware assessment. The team tested BlackFog for a 3 week period. “Once we started using BlackFog it clicked pretty quickly and it was a much more powerful tool than we initially expected. It was effectively acting as a gatekeeper for our data on every single device, no matter where our employees were working or what device they were working on. Once we had visibility into the data leaving all the devices it was evident it was an important piece of the cybersecurity puzzle,” commented Jeremy.

The organization now has BlackFog installed on all company devices and it’s become an important part of their overall cybersecurity strategy. Steve Harris, Owner of Robert E. Harris commented, “BlackFog ensures that our end user devices are secure wherever our employees happen to be and it doesn’t slow down the devices or impact the productivity of our employees which is also important.

We can centrally manage everything from the console and we have access to historical data on every device so we know if there is an active attack or any threats. Knowing that we are doing everything we can to protect our data and prevent cyberattacks like ransomware really gives us peace of mind and we’d definitely recommend BlackFog to other organizations.”