Swedish retail giant Ellos Group started as a mail-order pioneer in 1947. Generations grew up with the Ellos catalogs, thumbing through the pages, wishing, and dreaming. Catalog sales have now been replaced by more modern solutions, but Ellos remains an important component of daily life for millions in the Nordic region and Europe. Today, the purchasing process is fully digital—with Ellos providing its customers a secure online experience that is smooth, transparent, and easy to use.

Keeping both the company and its customers secure has been the biggest challenge. As Ellos transitions to encompass more markets and brands, the risk exposure only increases.

Ransomware is the primary threat Ellos faces today, which makes endpoint security critical to the company. Keeping the user experience well-protected and easily accessible also remains an ongoing concern. “One of the greatest challenges is to make the experience as transparent as possible. We want both customers and internal users to know that they are secure, but we don’t want that security to be intrusive,” says Markus Andersson, chief information officer.

Ellos has been a happy Trend Micro customer since 2005. “When it comes to security, we want stability, and we’ve been very satisfied with Trend Micro,” says Andersson.

“A strong partner is necessary because security is such a niche expertise. You cannot stay ahead of everything because it’s happening so fast. We need access to full-time security experts, and if you don’t have that expertise in-house, that’s where a partner like Trend Micro comes in,” says Andersson.

Håkan Carlsson, operations support manager, also says Trend Micro’s customer service is a differentiator. “When you deal with big companies, it’s not often that you develop personal relationships like we have with Trend Micro. That is something that has really stood out,” says Carlsson.

Ellos benefitted from the ability to purchase through the AWS Marketplace. “Trend Micro worked very closely with Ellos to ensure that the company was able to maintain the aggressive discount it enjoyed from AWS Marketplace. It was a very smooth process,” says Carlsson.

Trend Micro has consistently provided the solutions that Ellos has needed as it grows and evolves. “We’ve been following Trend Micro’s recommended upgrade path. The last thing we did was move to Trend Micro Apex One™ as a service to protect our endpoints,” says Andersson.

In fact, Trend Micro offers a broad range of solutions capable of meeting any security need, including an end-to-end security platform. As a result, Trend Micro has become a strong security partner for Ellos. “I think it’s super important to have a strong partner when it comes to cybersecurity,” says Andersson.

“Apex One has been one of the greatest endpoint security tools for us in avoiding my nightmare— ransomware—because it filters out everything. Some people might think that an email filter is not an advanced form of protection, but it’s actually the most important form of protection you can have. It’s been working great for us. Our security operations center (SOC) tells me that Apex One is the reason we have so few incidents,” says Andersson.

Andersson also noted that Trend Micro Apex One perfectly accommodates his goal of having nonintrusive security. “It doesn’t slow down the computer, which is my experience with other endpoint protection products. The user doesn’t even know that it’s there; it just works,” says Andersson.

Andersson’s mission is to maintain the Ellos Group’s position as a digital leader in the ecommerce space in the Nordic region and in Europe. And there’s more work to be done in continuing and refining the digital transformation process, including more data analysis, increased personalization of content, and further incorporating machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

Maintaining security is a necessity in supporting the ever-continuing process of transformation—particularly in the face of escalating threats. “Ellos has evolved with Trend Micro—and the partnership between these two industry leaders will likely continue to evolve for many years to come,” says Carlsson.