Konoike Transport

Konoike Transport secures international inboxes and reduces operational and administrative burdens with Cloudflare

Formed in 1880 and incorporated in 1945, the KONOIKE Group is a professional organization that continually challenges itself to solve society’s problems and innovate, going beyond the boundaries of logistics and expanding into manufacturing, medical, airport operations, and more.

The company has approximately 14,000 employees (24,000 on a consolidated basis as of March 31, 2023), 186 offices in Japan and 33 overseas. They have defined their medium-term business plan between FY23 and FY25 as “Pursue Innovation”, and they engage to solving social problems through utilizing technology, DX, and collaborative business.

A rising tide of sophisticated email-borne threats

With a widely distributed global footprint, Konoike Transport relies heavily on email to exchange important information. Despite the efficacy of email for company communications, Konoike Transport experienced an increase in hostile parties using the medium as an attack vector to distribute malware and ransomware, phish for user credentials, or exploit employee inboxes for fraudulent purposes. In a month they would receive about 30 internal inquiries that would take an excessive amount of time to respond and resolve.

To mitigate these risks while upgrading its existing email infrastructure under the Overseas Email Environment Integration Project, Konoike Transport began an internal security review. The company’s goal was to secure its communications, particularly as new variants of the Emotet Trojan malware campaign and a rising number of Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks began appearing frequently in Konoike Group employees’ inboxes.

“Although we were using a well-known email security software for protection, emails containing viruses, socially engineered content, and malicious code were slipping through the cracks regularly,” explains Masaya Sato, General Manager of the Digital Transformation Promotion Department, ICT Promotion at Konoike Transport. “As the emails became increasingly sophisticated and difficult to detect, the fear of intrusion and a heightened awareness of the importance of email security within the company led to a sharp increase in reports of suspicious emails to our help desk.”

Cloud Email Security for global high-accuracy, low-touch employee and customer protection

Evaluating best-in-breed email solutions from established cyber security vendors, Konoike Transport was unable to find a solution that matched its requirements — until Cloudflare.

“Only Cloudflare offered an easy-to-install and configure solution while providing advanced functionality to analyze, identify, and accurately protect us against threats,” says Satoshi Tomatsu, Digital Transformation Promotion Department, ICT Promotion Division at Konoike Transport.

Building upon the Cloudflare SSE and SASE platform, Cloudflare’s Cloud Email Security provided Konoike Transport with the low-touch, high-efficacy threat detection solution it needed to isolate malicious content. A Cloudflare Zero Trust product, Cloud Email Security secured the Konoike Group against sophisticated BEC, phishing and credential harvesting, and ransom and malware threats designed to evade traditional detection techniques.

“After a painless implementation, Cloudflare secured the Konoike Group, blocking over 80,000 malicious emails monthly — it accurately detects and quarantines threats before they become a problem,” says Tomatsu. “With Cloudflare protecting our inboxes, the number of email-related problem reports and support requests our IT department receives has dropped to one or less from over 30 per month — a 97% decrease.”

Distributing the administrative burden of multi-language, multi-domain threat detection

For the Konoike Group, the Overseas Email Environment Integration Project was a massive undertaking affecting every department and employee in the organization. With Cloudflare’s assistance, the company completed the project in two phases. For Phase 1, the company deployed Cloudflare Email Security as a single tenant for the entire group companies' email. This provided email transport and security services for all the company’s subsidiaries and overseas entities.

With its core email infrastructure complete, the Konoike Group then provided each entity with email services under its own domain. Upon evaluation of it being successful, they split the single tenant to multi-tenants.By using Cloudflare’s highly configurable Cloud Email Security and managing its domains in the connectivity cloud, Konoike Group easily secures and administers an otherwise complex deployment.

“Cloudflare gives us consistent, unified email security while allowing us to decentralize our operational burden. It provides each subsidiary with its own administrative console to add or remove users, adjust permissions, and establish policies within our central email infrastructure,” says Tomatsu. “One advantage of using Cloudflare is that no matter what language a subsidiary uses — Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Tagalog, or any other — it detects and quarantines suspicious emails without fail. Around the world, Cloudflare analysis and aggregation functions reduce the time required to analyze trends, and visualize and neutralize threats.”

Partnering for success

Despite its misgivings about entering a new, untested partnership when it embarked Overseas Email Environment Integration Project, Cloudflare delivered beyond the company’s expectations.

“Given the global stakes and the number of people our email integration affected, we had some concerns about onboarding a new solutions partner,” says Sato. “Cloudflare put an end to our fears by providing top-notch support from the day we began the project until everything was up and running smoothly.”

“We also contact the support desk when we have discussions about possible product malfunctions, and the customer success team is able to provide us with more in-depth answers in those discussions, which we feel leads to the expected results.” says Tomatsu. “We really value Cloudflare’s Premium Success instruction on product functionality, support for our functional improvement requests, and interest in our input on its product roadmaps.”