IT Director
Meeting ITAR and CMMC 2.0 compliance is a top priority for any business operating in the defense industrial base today. For businesses with sufficient IT budgets, Microsoft Office 365 offers an effective solution. However, businesses with constrained IT budgets must find affordable and compelling alternatives.
This case study explains how one such company, with tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue, and a global workforce distributed across hundreds of locations, selected Virtru over Microsoft GCC High and saved more than $1 million, while complying with CMMC and ITAR regulations.
With Virtru, this enterprise was able to:
This enterprise is a Microsoft shop. Its teams were using a mix of Microsoft Commercial Cloud and Microsoft Exchange Server — but they wanted a more unified, modernized environment where employees could collaborate securely and seamlessly in the cloud.
They looked into Microsoft’s GCC High environment, but the price tag was hefty. Migrating thousands of employees to the GCC High environment would have required significant resources — not to mention the annual recurring expense of their licenses. In addition to the high cost, moving to GCC High would limit collaboration between Microsoft GCC High and Commercial Cloud users, which would have created massive roadblocks for productivity.
So, the team started to investigate alternatives.
The team was looking for an encryption solution that would allow for seamless and highly secure data sharing and collaboration, both with internal and external users. It needed to be easy for users, admins, and the recipients of shared data. They looked at PreVeil, but found the recipient experience of encrypted emails to be lacking. They wanted something easy, professional, and intuitive.
They found what they were looking for in Virtru:
The enterprise could also manage its own encryption keys for total control and security with the Virtru Private Keystore, and it could leverage Virtru’s Data Protection Gateway to automatically encrypt emails containing certain types of sensitive information.
The firm needed a cloud security partner with deep expertise, including engineers who would be flexible, extremely knowledgeable, and honest about potential challenges. Virtru’s engineering team not only met, but exceeded their expectations. “The reason we closed the deal was not just because of the solution,” said the firm’s Chief Security Officer. “It was because of the way [the Virtru sales and engineering teams] treated us.”
“It's a great partnership,” he continued. “We see everything in the security space. It's very rare that we get a vendor with this type of acumen and reputation. Usually, talking to [vendors, you feel disappointed, or like the solution] is missing something. You feel like you didn't really get the toy in the Happy Meal™. You got the burger, but it was missing something, right? … But, job well done to Virtru. It was different. It was refreshing. You made my job easy.”
With Virtru, the firm would save over $1 million each year by not switching to GCC High. They were able to deploy powerful encryption to the global workforce, unify their Microsoft environment, and ultimately shut down their last Microsoft Exchange on-prem server.
“It's a win-win,” the CSO noted. “Usually what happens is, you bring in a security vendor or an encryption vendor, and someone loses. We're still trying to find out who the loser is. We haven't found that group yet. Everybody's a winner.”
