Konoike Drives Digital Work at 170 Locationswith the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange

Konoike Transport is a comprehensive logistics company founded in 1880, which offers contracting services that support manufacturing and service industries and logistics services that meet various domestic and international needs.

The company has been working on transforming and strengthening its management foundation to achieve its quantitative targets, which they call its ‘2030 Vision’, by reinforcing systemization and automation investment as well as reviewing its head office business operations in order to enhance productivity.

The company’s midterm IT strategy, formulated in 2018, can be broken down into 3 initiatives;

1. Contribution to the business through digital innovation
2. Realization of high speed business management with a global- and cockpit-type management information foundation
3. Development of an aggressive and defensive IT based on in-house system

“Reflecting on the midterm IT strategy, we have established five pillars of actions. The first action is to convert all ICT platforms to the cloud in order to achieve digital transformation (DX). The second is to improve productivity by using RPA at about 170 domestic sales offices.”

“The third is to build an information infrastructure for group management. The fourth is to completely renovate the deteriorated logistics system, and the fifth is to achieve work style innovation prioritizing security,” says Shigeru Ogawara, Executive Officer.

Based on this scheme, Konoike Transport has set up cloud-first initiatives, spent two years to move from an on-premises logistics system to the cloud, and switched internal communication tools and other systems to SaaS.

In 2020, Konoike Transport completed its transformation from data center-based infrastructure, and they now operate on cloud-based infrastructure, where no assets need to be owned by themselves.

Konoike Transport initially used three major carriers for WAN. Additionally, laptops were owned by the company, and employees needed to sign up when they wanted to take them out of the office, which required various complicated settings to make sure they are secure outside the office. This included using a VPN appliance or a communication device that is directly connected to the carrier network.

This also meant that the System Management team had to complete all settings. To tackle this problem, Konoike Transport decided to provide laptops to employees and allowed for their use any time during working hours. The company then started to look for a solution to eliminate perimeter of employee work locations and integrate carriers for WAN.

At the same time, another problem occurred due to business expansion, which led to an increase in the number of PCs, cloud service usage, and VPN connections.

“In the past, to access the network, connections were established by the default gateway of the data center. As the use of cloud services increased, the bandwidth became the bottleneck, but we continued to use the same gateway to establish VPN connections. The internet processing speed on laptops was slow due to the restriction imposed on the amount of data. Overseas, only 3G communication connections were available, and furthermore, we could not use public Wi-Fi at all because of our security policy. There were so many restrictions and I wondered if there was a way to avoid the bottleneck while ensuring security, regardless of the communication environment in Japan or overseas.”

“That was when I came up with the Zscaler solution, which was adapted by the global company I worked for previously,” explains Masaya Sato, Deputy GM, Digital Transformation Promotion Department.

Until then, network security measures were strictly implemented by installing appliances in the gateway of the data center, but since individual measures were taken at pinpoints, there were loopholes in unexpected places. Usability was also a problem, and the operational burden was heavy.

Seeing that a trade off between security and convenience cannot be avoided with the traditional approach, the company decided to build an environment that can improve user comfort and contribute to business while maintaining a high security level.

Konoike Transport planned to carry out security measures consisting of two steps. First, for device security, they deployed their endpoint detection and response (EDR) product integrated with a next-generation antivirus (NGAV) functions to ensure endpoint security. Secondly, Konoike Transport adopted Zscaler for network security to apply boundless security on the entire network.

For a cloud security platform, they implemented Zscaler Internet Access™ (ZIA™) to secure external application connections and Zscaler Private Access™ (ZPA™) to secure internal application connections.

“The reason we chose ZIA does not only rely on our ability to use firewall functions on the cloud and enable end-to-end encryption, but we considered it will be an optimal means to control secure access to the internet from domestic and overseas locations. The comfort of direct connections was also a true value for us, which was possible by leveraging ZPA and ZIA, allowing users to connect to the internal system unknowingly. Through this solution, we can seamlessly access external and internal applications and users can perform their business from anywhere while ensuring security,” explains Sato.

The company started introducing ZPA after completing PoC in April 2019. By May 2019, users at the head office increased to 650. From the end of 2019 onward we started to expand deployment throughout the entire company, which is estimated to be completed by the end of 2020.

Konoike Transport highly appreciates secure access to the internet with the Zscaler Zero trust Exchange.

“Through this solution, we are now able to securely connect laptops to the internal system regardless of locations. Initially we started to introduce a system for work-from-home to be fully prepared for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, mainly for employees at the Head Office. This has been effective, especially when we closed both the Osaka Head Office and the Tokyo Head Office in April 2020 due to the COVID-19 state of emergency. Since then our entire staff including the President have been able to work from home by using an online conferencing system and other tools through Zscaler’s services,” says Ogawara.

Konoike Transport utilizes IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, and other business applications to develop unique, competitive systems in-house.

The design and development are carried out by its subsidiary. An example is a new WMS (Warehouse Management System) designed for more than 60 distribution centers in Japan, which started operating from July 2020. Besides, the security platform empowered by ZIA and ZPA is planned to be in use across the entire company.

Most of the 29 domestic and 33 overseas subsidiaries have been acquired through M&A and the scale and structure of IT systems are different from each other. The company plans to deploy ZIA and ZPA in locations across the globe to enable the entire group to safely access the system and continue operating regardless of where employees work (interview date: April 22, 2020).