Together Housing

Together Housing Association is one of the largest organisations of its kind in the north of England, managing over 37,000 homes across the region. As a non-profit, all the money it makes is invested back into the company for the benefit of residents and local communities.

The ICT team for the group continually scan the market for new products which might align with Together Housing’s evolving requirements, as well as managing day-to-day hybrid server and network environments. There are two main sites with many more satellite offices and 1,600 users to manage across that ICT infrastructure.

Organisations like Together Housing may not sound like the typical target for a cybercriminal. However, these types of organisations are often seen as a “soft” target that may be less well protected than commercial counterparts.

According to a 2020 government survey, a quarter of charities (26%) reported having experienced cybersecurity breaches or attacks in the previous 12 months, rising to 57% for those with larger incomes. It’s a figure that’s been on the rise for several years.

Together Housing was already a Trend Micro customer, but recently began a journey towards a more unified, cloud-centric, connected threat defence approach. They wanted solutions across network, endpoint, and cloud app layers that closely interact for maximum protection and minimum management overhead.

The ICT team have always viewed themselves as enablers for the organisation, and have been open to trialling new Trend Micro products.

“We are led by Trend Micro in terms of the roadmap for products,” the team said.

“If it is benefitting us as an organisation and making our life easier while improving security, we will look to roll out additional solutions.”

Although Together Housing was already set up with a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and had a flexible working philosophy pre-pandemic, the transition to mass remote working forced by COVID-19 accelerated its digital transformation even further. Trend Micro has been there every step of the way to support these efforts.

Together Housing upgraded to Trend Micro Vision One™ for unified endpoint protection, Deep Discovery™ Inspector for network-based threat detection and Cloud App Security (CAS).

"We’ve been working with Trend Micro a few years now and work so well with the team there. If we need to configure a product in an unusual way or have any other queries, we have access to the technical guys immediately. We jump online and we get the job done. You just don’t seem to get that from other vendors."

ICT Team,
Together Housing Association

Trend Micro Vision One offers:

• A blend of cross-generational threat techniques (pre-execution and runtime machine learning, application control, DLP, anti-malware, etc.)
• Centralised visibility and control from a single portal, covering virtual and on-premises endpoints
• Detection and response through integration with Trend Micro Vision One’s XDR capabilities 

Deep Discovery Inspector offers:

• Visibility into all network ports and over 105 protocols.
• Monitoring of east-west and north-south traffic.
• Detection of targeted ransomware and advanced threats. 

Cloud App Security offers:

• Seamless SaaS-based protection for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and other cloud apps
• Protection against millions of threats per year that are not spotted by Google/Microsoft
• Detection of ransomware, BEC, and other threats using advanced machine learning

With Trend Micro Vision One in place the team have been able to enforce security policy across all virtual and regular endpoints and servers across the non-profit’s 1,600-strong userbase, wherever they are—particularly useful given the distributed nature of the workforce.

The integration of Trend Micro Vision One XDR across endpoints, servers, cloud apps, and the network has been particularly powerful in providing correlated threat detection and response across the entire environment.

From the ICT team’s perspective, the unified visibility and control Trend Micro provides from a single user interface has been especially welcome—boosting ICT staff productivity.

“In the past, being forced to log-in to different services to check alerts and notifications could be quite cumbersome,” explained the team. “With Trend Micro it’s all there in one window, which is a lot more intuitive. It just makes life much easier.” The success of the relationship is not just down to product but also people, they conclude.

“We’ve been working with Trend Micro a few years now and work so well with the team there. If we need to configure a product in an unusual way or have any other queries, we have access to the technical guys immediately. We jump online and we get the job done. You just don’t seem to get that from other vendors.”