What do a New Zealand-based energy company, a Singaporean connectivity provider, a global digital engineering firm, and a Thai fintech group have in common?
The answer: Each has faced similar challenges in managing data and other assets in a hyperconnected world, including latency, lack of visibility, and rising costs among them.
During Check Point Software’s CPX 2025 APAC conference in Bangkok, these four enterprises shared their digital transformation journey and how they built a security-first strategy for their deployments.
Modernising security legacy
For Vector Ltd, which distributes gas and electricity in New Zealand, moving away from legacy technology was not an easy decision but a necessary one.
“Our main focus when evaluating solutions was how they would impact our users’ performance. Our workforce is spread across multiple locations and roles, so we needed to ensure that everyone — from those out in the field to those in the headquarters — had a smooth experience throughout the digital transformation process,” said Aaron McKeown, Chief Information Security Officer at Vector.
According to McKeown, the company’s legacy system was nearing end of life, lacked support for multi-factor authentication, and was incompatible with their existing cybersecurity stack. This led to the decision to migrate to Check Point’s secure access service edge (SASE) solutions.
“We spent a lot of time upfront on planning and change management. We also spent a lot of time in a sort of pilot phase. We ran a pilot with about 120 users over six weeks at the start of the program to make sure we were actually making the right choices. Then, we followed through with a massive amount of organisation-wide communication, and all of those things really paid off in how we engaged our internal stakeholders,” said McKeown.
Protecting high-speed networks
Meanwhile, for Singapore’s National Research and Education Network (SingAREN), security and connectivity go hand in hand. The organisation connects Singapore’s universities and research institutes to counterparts around the world — including in Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States — and had to overcome several challenges to ensure high volumes of research data could be exchanged securely.
SingAREN faced three key challenges: securing a high-speed, high-throughput network without impacting performance; gaining visibility into its attack surface; and defending against a growing number of global cyberattacks.
“We needed to look at the network traffic and see where our users are trapped. We needed to see whether data is going through, especially now that a lot of researchers are leveraging the cloud,” said Jon Lau, Vice President, SingAREN.
To resolve the issue, the organisation partnered with Check Point, leveraging its Quantum Maestro hyperscale network security solution. As a result, SingAREN gained comprehensive visibility into threats, enabling it to monitor and prevent potential security breaches. The implementation also optimised traffic performance, significantly increasing throughput despite high volumes of data in transit.
“We can now understand a lot of the data that is going through today,” Lau noted.
Managing multi-cloud security
Meanwhile, for digital engineering firm Virtusa, the cloud journey began around eight years ago. As with many early cloud adopters, the migration presented a unique set of challenges.
“First, we needed visibility into what we had across multiple cloud service providers (CSPs). Then, we had to manage policies across them. We also had to deal with ever-expanding threats in the cloud — and more importantly, the attack surface increased exponentially,” said Salman Kaleem, Director of Technology and Cloud Security at Virtusa.
By leveraging Check Point’s CloudGuard web application firewall (WAF), the company was able to automate deployment and provisioning at scale.
“We integrated CloudGuard with all our landing zones across four CSPs. That allowed us to deploy and manage all our security policies through a centralised view — a single dashboard to monitor how well protected our environments are. We were able to write and manage policies very efficiently,” Kaleem said.
This was a major undertaking, Kaleem added, as 95% of Virtusa’s workloads are now deployed in the cloud.
Securing a digital ecosystem
Then, there’s Thai fintech group SCBX, which has 12 subsidiaries — including a bank, a credit card company, and a data analytics firm. The group serves around 30 million customers and employs about 13,000 people.
Given the scale of the business, visibility across its entire digital infrastructure was a key concern, said Tony Wongwanich, Head of Group Security Strategy & Advisory, SCBX.
“We identified four use cases. The first was finding out if there were any threats or data leaks on the dark web. The second was detecting whether anyone was impersonating our website or one of our executives. The third was our supply chain — we might be very secure, but our third party may not be at the same level. Lastly, it was about the entire attack surface,” he said.
After reviewing several vendors, SCBX chose to partner with Check Point and deploy its External Risk Management solution.
Now, we can monitor external risk, and we’ve identified around 1,000 fake websites, Facebook pages, and applications. We’re able to take them down faster,” said Wongwanich.
He added that the company can now see if customer data has been leaked on the dark web — and act pre-emptively before hackers take advantage.
Adapting to survive
In today’s hyperconnected enterprise environment, the first priority is understanding the right architecture for securely connecting with that broader ecosystem, said Itai Greenberg, Chief Strategy Officer at Check Point Software.
“If we look at this architecture of the cloud-only SASE, you’ll see that it has some limitations — such as costs and latency — and it’s important to understand those limitations, because it’s not the architecture for everything in the hyperconnected world, and it’s not the hardware for every use case,” he remarked.
In contrast, a hybrid mesh architecture would allow enterprises the agility to route their traffic however they want, while ensuring security across environments, Greenberg added.
Ultimately, staying ahead in cybersecurity is a constant race — a process of continual learning and adaptation to keep up with evolving threats, technologies, and enterprise needs, said Nadav Zafrir, Chief Executive Officer at Check Point Software.
Living in this ever-changing environment keeps us constantly on our toes. It’s an incredible learning competition between offence and defence. Sometimes we’re ahead; sometimes they are — but for the most part, we’re challenged every day, and that’s an incredible place to be. We completely depend on our digital infrastructure, and without the best security, we lose trust in it. If that trust is lost, much of what we’ve achieved as a civilisation is at risk,” he said.
