How E-Commerce Platform DeinDeal Solved the Private Access Puzzle

About DeinDeal: 

Founded in 2010, DeinDeal is the number one discount e-commerce platform in Switzerland specializing in nationwide flash deals, with offices in Geneva and Zurich. 

The Challenge:

Legacy Solutions a Barrier to Scaling

DeinDeal was tired of using a VPN for cloud access and its remote workforce. The Zurich-based company was growing fast, with a complex IT environment screaming out for a new solution.  

“Remote access was becoming an issue along with scaling up the workforce,” Alexandre Branquart, co-founder of DeinDeal said. “A classical VPN solution, with an appliance in our internal network, complicated a lot of the interconnections with all the environments that we have: on-prem and cloud solutions from different cloud services. Providing access to all those resources in a remote work environment became a nightmare, to be honest. Working with the VPN agent was also a tedious and frustrating task – employees used it, but they didn’t like it.” 

It was so bad that the company tried to avoid deploying remote access as much as possible, but that was never going to work long term. So DeinDeal started researching zero trust network access solutions to solve its networking woes.  

The company looked at many different solutions with the goal of finding something that was simple to use and manage. “Simplification is a good piece for security,” Alexandre said. “The more complex you are, the more failures you can have. When you simplify the strategy, you are always more efficient.” 

During the research phase, it quickly became clear that Perimeter 81 had a lot of the qualities Alexandre was looking for. 

DeinDeal began with an initial test group, and then quickly scaled up to include most of the company in a matter of weeks. 

“For us it was really amazing to work with a solution that was easy to implement and deploy,” Alexandre said. “In a few clicks, we created remote gateways and finished the setup. It was really interesting to move forward fast.” 

DeinDeal’s workforce also took well to their new remote access solution. “The deployment was smooth for our users,” Alexandre said. “Perimeter 81 solved one of our pain points since the agent is easy to use and works everywhere. When you have many users with many different contexts and use cases, it’s hard to keep it stable and simple to use. We appreciate what the Perimeter 81 agent did for us in this respect.” 

Robust Security and Easy Management Seals the Deal

Quick deployment with an easy to use agent servicing a varied workforce and complex IT environment is only half the story, however. For Alexandre and DeinDeal, enhanced security was also a big reason for embracing Perimeter 81. 

“I was really impressed with Perimeter 81, because it was a different way of doing things,” Alexandre said. “Most of the time you have an appliance, people connect to that appliance, and get access to some resource. But Perimeter 81’s gateways can connect to our infrastructure containing different technologies, which was really impressive. It helped us simplify traffic and access management. We created small units isolated from each other to better manage and monitor those resources. So it was really a game changer for us.” 

As an added security benefit, DeinDeal is now able to monitor network activity in a way that wasn’t previously possible. “Being able to monitor users and device activities, and then export the logs, allows our security teams to be much more confident and proactive for our security monitoring. So having all those logs imported into our external logging system allows us to keep an eye on what’s going on with network traffic,” according to Alexandre,  

Monitoring and logs are important management tools, because they reveal what’s been happening on your network. In the unlikely event of a breach, DeinDeal wanted to understand what led to it. How did the attacker get in, and what did they do?  

“It’s really important for us to keep the most granular logs possible, because when we have a cyber attack we need to know what happened at that time,” Alexandre said. “So having logs about user activities, devices, and so on is a must.” 

A Maturing Culture of Zero Trust With Perimeter 81 

DeinDeal is moving beyond the initial ZTNA deployment to enhancing security by duplicating pre-existing on-prem firewall rules in its Perimeter 81 cloud firewall. It also wants to implement device posture check in the coming months to ensure that employee devices comply with security policies prior to accessing the network.  

Meanwhile, DeinDeal is finding other tasks for the IT team now that network security is running smoothly. “You don’t need to have huge IT teams to make Perimeter 81 work, but the goal for us is not to reduce people on the team, it’s to increase availability to do other tasks,” Alexandre said. 

DeinDeal’s plan to simplify the network has paid off and now the IT team truly is more efficient as less time is spent managing legacy technologies.