Note: This article is transcribed from an interview with Markus Doorn, the CEO of a financial institution in the Asia-Pacific region for an European organization. The team adopted FydeOS, enabling secure cloud-based work, thereby reducing overall operational costs and enhancing employee motivation and flexibility.
Financial services institutions must exercise great caution when introducing new technologies, especially when it involves enabling employees to work in the cloud. We must prioritize the security of customer data and ensure that our business remains resilient against threats from malicious software on the internet.
As the era of hybrid workplaces emerges, employees are gradually losing interest in the conventional “on-site” work culture. Hence, it is imperative for us to provide an efficient cloud-based working solution.
The reason behind our choice of FydeOS is simple – it allows employees to work remotely while safeguarding the security of company data.
Data is stored in the cloud, ensuring the security of customer information
We are a financial institution headquartered in Europe, with almost one-third of our business operations located in the Asia-Pacific region. This requires us not only to comply with the financial privacy regulations within the European Union but also to adhere to the relevant rules in the Asia-Pacific locations where we operate. As a result, we hold ourselves to rigorous security standards.
By the end of 2020, we planned to replace a batch of Windows devices that had been in use for many years. Prolonged usage led to decreased performance speed and increased maintenance costs. Moreover, the persistent threat of malicious ransomware targeting Windows systems made us reconsider our approach to safeguarding critical data. Even with encryption protection, there was no guarantee that employees’ chosen encryption measures would be robust enough to withstand brute-force attacks, potentially resulting in significant losses if an employee inadvertently fell victim. Therefore, we carefully considered the option of migrating our data to the cloud.
In addition to security, speed was another concern when it came to using Windows computers. Our European data centre is over ten thousand kilometres away from various offices in the Asia-Pacific region, resulting in slow and unreliable business network connections. We were looking for a cloud-based business solution that would enable secure and fast data interaction and storage, reducing security vulnerabilities.
FydeOS is a customised cloud-first operating system based on the Chromium project. It is lightweight, secure and provides fast response times with minimal latency, even on older devices. Using the FydeOS cloud management platform, we successfully installed FydeOS on the laptops of 350 employees in the Asia-Pacific region remotely through “seamless registration” without physical contact. These devices were then integrated into the enterprise management domain, ensuring that both user and employee data is securely stored in a private cloud environment.
The overall holding cost has significantly decreased
By 2023, with the exception of a few departments that require a Windows environment, we will have all our employees on FydeOS devices.
Thanks to the FydeOS Management Cloud platform, our IT management team has saved a significant amount of time on operational maintenance. Administrators can now set up appropriate work environments and application configurations based on the needs of different departments via the cloud management backend and push them out to departmental employees’ devices with a single click. This allows employees to get to work quickly without having to spend time configuring their computers.
We have also implemented user behaviour blacklisting and whitelisting, which effectively prevents device malfunctions caused by human error, thereby reducing the number of support tickets.
In our most recent financial assessment, FydeOS delivered an overall 17% reduction in operational costs in just 10 months. The results are remarkable.
Facilitates employees in effortlessly transitioning into a hybrid working model
With FydeOS, we can resolve most issues remotely, eliminating the need for employees to visit offline offices for support unless absolutely necessary. In the post-pandemic era, some employees have discovered the many benefits of working remotely, and we have found that employee efficiency remains unaffected, if not improved. In response to this demand, we have adopted a hybrid approach to working that gives employees the flexibility to choose where they work, and we are proud of this decision.
Visit our official website https://fydeos.io/enterprise-solution/ to learn more about FydeOS enterprise solution and its features. A free trial is now available, so come and experience it!