Safeguarding Engineering Know-How

CÉH Zrt is an engineering company based in Hungary that serves a multitude of local and international customers with CAD/CAM design and consultancy. Using modern digital technologies, it is at the forefront of innovation and sustainable growth, helping partners to succeed by sharing its vast company expertise.

“For us, our know-how is everything,” says Attila Spisák, CIO and Facility Manager at CÉH. “The combined brainpower of our engineers is the most valuable asset we own and the primary source of our market advantage. It is therefore absolutely essential that we protect ourselves against knowledge theft while maintaining optimal conditions for our day-to-day work. That is why we decided to the Flowmon solution to boost our security and gain visibility into our network traffic.”

Anomaly detection and cross-solution integration

CÉH is using the Flowmon NPMD suite complete with the Packet Investigator and Anomaly Detection System (ADS).

As the company’s engineers use ArchiCAD, Revit, and AutoCAD – which are networkbased to enable collaboration – the solution monitors the throughputs and key services, both cloud-hosted and on-premises. “We have immediate insights into latency issues or any misconfigurations. Thanks to the detailed data the system provides, we can troubleshoot immediately and even anticipate problems before they occur” adds Mr. Spisák.

Meanwhile, the Flowmon ADS scans the network for traffic anomalies and suspicious behaviors. “We need to pay attention to any behavior that may indicate potential data theft, so we’ve fine-tuned the system to alert on anomalous uploads and communication with blacklisted hosts,” says Mr. Spisák. The detection of any of these behaviors triggers full packet capture by the Packet Investigator, which automatically analyses the packets and provides deep insights into the anomaly immediately.

“We are also monitoring the communication with file-sharing services like Rapidshare, WeTransfer or Dropbox to prevent damage from internal adversaries,” he continues.

CÉH has integrated the solution with Paessler’s PRTG, so key alerts that the Flowmon solution issues show up in PRTG, too. “The ability of the two solutions to work together saves us a lot of time,” says Mr. Spisák “We have a high-level overview of our IT’s health and operational status in PRTG and can quickly switch to Flowmon wherever we need more detail.”

Lastly, the reporting is automated, so that CÉH’s IT team can start each Monday with a freshly generated weekly report.

Go-to troubleshooting tool

With the Flowmon solution, CÉH has the perfect knowledge of its operational health as well as the presence of any network-borne threats.

“The Flowmon is our go-to network troubleshooting tool that helps us resolve interlope network issues and provides us with insights into any threat activity that would put our company expertise in jeopardy,” concludes Mr. Spisák.