Case

Delivering simple, secure cloud access for Cats Protection

Cats Protection is the largest feline welfare charity in the UK. Building on previous work together, Conscia and Cats Protection continued their partnership with the delivery of one of the largest deployments of a security solution in the UK, enabling users to simply and securely access organisational services wherever they are.

Cats Protection is the UK’s largest feline welfare charity, helping an average of 157,000 cats and kittens every year. Since it was first formed in 1927, the charity has rehomed over two million cats and helped many more, surviving war and recession thanks to the dedication and commitment of employees and volunteers. Today, in addition to the flagship adoption centre and administration offices in Chelwood Gate, Sussex, Cats Protection comprises a network of over 100 retail shops and 34 adoption centres.

Cats Protection has already put substantial time and effort into ensuring the networks and systems across its organisation are resilient and secure, and is aware of the need to employ the right services and solutions to achieve these tasks. Conscia has worked with the organisation on multiple fronts, helping to facilitate their ongoing strategy to migrate to the cloud, enable security by design, improve support for third-party integrations, and become fully mobile enabled. With more devices and applications being added to the network, Cats Protection now wanted to take their security to the next level.

The challenge

• As more devices and applications were added to the organisation’s existing network, concerns wereincreasing around the potential for cyber security breaches. Cats Protection needed to ensure that upgrades such as BYOD policies, guest Wi-Fi, or the use of IoT devices did not pose a risk to the personal, financial, and commercial data held by the charity.
• Having previously partnered with Conscia for the successful implementation of Cisco Umbrella, Cats Protection was looking to expand its cloud-delivered security services, so as to facilitate a simplified process for access to services, both on-premises and remotely.

Outcomes

• Cisco Meraki Advanced Security licensing, Umbrella, and ISE have given Cats Protection the ability to implement granular security polices with detailed insights into how the network is being used.
• Conscia supported Cats Protection in evaluating and implementing a new cloud-managed Cisco security solution, delivering a radically simplified process for the organisation to securely access its applications and resources. This enabled them be hosted
  anywhere, and be accessible from any location, at any time.
• Cats Protection was provided with access to a unified SSE/SASE experience, with the management of security and networking all centralised within the Meraki dashboard.
• The process has also allowed for much-improved visibility into the Cats Protection network. The organisation can now use the centralised dashboard to more easily and effectively monitor and control the use of applications and services.
• Close integration between the cloud-managed solution and the Meraki SD-WAN has allowed for simple AutoVPN functionality, giving Cats Protection administrators the ability to extend the SD-WAN fabric at a button press, rather than requiring complex manual configuration or routing tables.
• Building upon the foundation that Conscia had previously facilitated with Cisco Umbrella, the solution was able to unify multiple functions that traditionally required a set of on-premises security appliances, including secure web gateway, firewall, DNS-layer security, cloud access security broker functionality, and data loss prevention.

Given the considerable size of Cats Protection and its network, this project represents one of the largest deployments of a security solution of this type in the UK. Cats Protection users are now able to simply and securely access organisational services, wherever they might be based, and the additional visibility and security that Cisco and Conscia provides has put the organisation in an excellent position looking to the future.