Mitsubishi Estate Enhances its IT infrastructure with Progress® Flowmon®

A digital innovator, Mitsubishi Estate is focused on the creation of various new digital-driven businesses and support for each business through data-driven management. It promotes and strengthens these businesses and services using digital experience and the construction and strengthening of IT infrastructure that supports transformation.

From the perspective of IT its infrastructure, the company has not been able to fully visualize network traffic up until now, so it needed a solution that could predict the demand for communication that is increasing daily due to the expansion of SaaS usage, and to monitor network status during events like virus infections. Currently, the company is working to advance infrastructure sophistication and strengthen security by promoting zero trust in its network infrastructure environment.

“Our environment previously had an SNMP-based monitoring system that allowed us to grasp only the absolute volume of communication,” said Mr. Kobayashi, Manager of the DX Promotion Department at Mitsubishi Estate. “However, because we did not know the content of the communication, when a user reported slow communication speeds or an alarm for a communication volume threshold went off, it was difficult to analyze which communication was straining the network lines or network devices. In addition, we were unable to determine which internal or external destination communication had occurred from an infected PC terminal, and had to analyze data from firewall logs, etc., which took time in the event of an emergency.”

To strengthen their IT infrastructure and security, Mitsubishi Estate decided to invest in Progress® Flowmon®. After conducting its due diligence, consideration began in June 2022, with implementation in October 2022. Since the previous monitoring system was also replaced and operational improvements were made at the same time, implementation was completed in June 2023. Mr. Kobayashi says there were three main points he focused on when making his selection.

“First, Flowmon has a user interface that is easy for network administrators to use. Second, it has been already adopted by other companies. Third, and for us the most important point, is the ability to grasp communication volume on a pre-URL basis,” he said.

Mr. Kobayashi further explained that the company uses a proxy server, so if it wanted to understand the traffic volume at the IP address level, it would be aggregated on the proxy server, making it impossible to grasp the actual situation. However, by introducing Flowmon Probe, the company was able to visualize traffic volume on a URL basis, which was the key factor in their decision to adopt the system. The company was also impressed with Flowmon’s UI, which for example enables graphs to be output in multiple formats to make them easy for network administrators to understand, and that the top ten traffic usage figures could be output to track usage status.

“We needed an IT partner who could manage both operations and maintenance. With two out of three companies recommending Flowmon, we chose Flowmon because of the high trust these service providers had in them,” Mr. Kobayashi said. “Additionally, we selected Mitsubishi Jisho IT Solutions Co., Ltd. (MJIT) for its cutting-edge technology and expertise, as well as Mitsubishi Electric Information Network Corporation (MIND) for their dependable ICT solutions and superior services.”