What does HENNGE One really aim to solve?
Hi, I’m Go Nakakomi, the person in charge of business abroad. HENNGE One is the cloud security for SaaS which is the most adopted service in Japan at the time of 2024. In order to make more people know about HENNGE One, we say what HENNGE One can do in many different places. But, since we don’t say a lot about what we want to solve by providing HENNGE One, I would like to share my understanding of the reason in this article.
Starting with corporate philosophy
If we start to talk about “why”, we can not avoid mentioning “Liberation of Technology”. “Liberation of Technology” is our corporate philosophy which is the core belief why we do our business. “Liberation of Technology” is to turn technology into a solution and deliver to a vast number of customers so that those customers can transform themselves to keep challenging to change our world for the better. And, our company name HENNGE comes from a combination of a Japanese term for change, “HENka” and “challeNGE”. In short, we would like to keep delivering IT solutions to the customers to improve their productivity.
Major challenges regarding the IT department
Since the company's establishment in 1997, HENNGE has always provided solutions to help the IT department. In fact, the solution we provided in the early days was graphic user interface software for Linux servers to help IT managers set up Linux servers intuitively, quickly, and easily. As we provide solutions to the IT department, we start to see that the IT department is the key department to lead the company's transformation.
If we look back at IT history, the IT department was always the key to transforming the company. In the 1990s, how fast the company adopted personal computers and how fast the company adopted office applications such as spreadsheets had a great impact on the company’s productivity. In the 2000s, utilization of the internet had an impact on changing the way we approach the customer. Websites and emails became major marketing channels to get leads. In the 2010s, the use of cloud computing and SaaS made innovative changes to our work style. And, in the the near future, I’m sure AI power will put us into a different way of working.
As we see, the adoption of forefront IT solutions plays a major role in making a company more productive to survive in a competitive business environment. The IT department is the department that leads those transformations. However, recently, the IT department faces 2 major challenges.
Challenge 1: Continuous threats of cyber attacks
Today, almost every week, we hear news of data breaches somewhere around the world. Most of them are done by phishing attacks or ransomware attacks. Phishing attacks are cyber-attacks that attempt to steal user credentials by leading victims to a phishing site that imitates the login page of major SaaS. Most phishing attacks are done by sending an email containing a link to the fake(phishing) page. On the other hand, ransomware attacks are cyber-attacks that will send ransomware. In fact, many ransomware attacks are also initiated by sending emails. The simplest way is to send emails with ransomware attached. Emotet is one of the ransomware attacks that attaches ransomware to password-protected zip files. In Japan, since attaching password-protected zip files was a business culture in sending emails, many companies became victims of Emotet. Another way of sending ransomware is to put the link to the ransomware file and make a person download the ransomware by clicking the link. This way has more chances of bypassing the inbound anti-malware filter unless anti-malware checks the linked file.
As we can see, many cyber attacks today start from email. Although other ways of attacks like password attacks are still popular, I think threat actors have learned that tricking people is a more efficient way to steal confidential information compared to cracking devices such as laptops.
Today, many people expose their names on the internet using SNS. This makes it easier for threat actors to acquire real existing names. And, it allows more victims to open the email and click the link in the email.
According to “2023 Security Awareness and Training” by Fortinet, 81% of the organization answered that they have encountered either malware(ransomware) attack, phishing attack or password attack. What this means is that the IT department is facing a big challenge to protect their company from daily cyber attacks which are evolving and becoming sophisticated every day.
Challenge 2: Lack of cybersecurity workforce
Since cyber attacks are caused by external threat actors, no matter how a company lacks human resources in the IT department, IT departments need to deal with it. What this fact causes is the shortage of a cybersecurity workforce. According to “ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study”, almost 4 million cybersecurity workforce is lacking around the world. In the report, shortage in the Asia-Pacific region and North America region is especially severe.
As the number of cyberattacks increases, the IT department faces another challenge which is to keep enough cybersecurity human resources.
HENNGE One to solve challenges
2 major challenges IT departments are facing right now are strengthening the protection from increasing cyber attacks and the necessity to ease the workload of the IT department due to the shortage of cybersecurity workforces. In fact, these 2 major issues are issues HENNGE One is trying to solve.
In reality, the inability to solve these challenges has a severe impact on the company, leading to a downward spiral. Even though there is a lack of IT department workforce, cyber attacks increase without caring about such a situation. Then, the company needs to prioritize improving protection from cyber attacks. That results in a delay in transforming the company. The delay in digital transformation means a loss of corporate competitiveness, which will result in struggling to hire IT human resources.
Feature-wise, HENNGE One is the SaaS security solution which provides essential identity security and email security. But as a whole solution there is a broader intention behind.
Continuously evolving SaaS security solution
HENNGE One is a suite product that contains a variety of security solutions, mainly for identity security and email security. But not only having a variety of security solutions, it continuously evolves by adding solutions according to the environmental change. Since 2011, when HENNGE One was first introduced to the market, we have consistently added a number of new solutions to HENNGE One. Usually, if there is an environmental change, new needs are generated. By listening to the needs of customers and identifying the real issues behind them, we kept adding solutions to solve those issues. This will continue as long as HENNGE One exists. This means that as long as customers are using HENNGE One, solutions for new cybersecurity threats are automatically added. By providing a service that continuously evolves, we aim to strengthen the protection from increasing cyber-attacks without asking customers to spend tremendous time researching and investigating.
Make it easily understandable by the “just right” strategy
From the establishment of the company, we focused on developing an easy-to-understand product. We want to “Liberate Technology.” If technology requires deeper IT knowledge, many companies will not be able to use it. And we see that technology is not liberated. To pursue,“Liberation of Technology,” we need to develop a product that is easy to understand for everyone.
Currently, we are calling to make such a product as a “just right” strategy. Actually, since security itself is complicated, it is extremely difficult to create a product that is easy to understand. What we focus on in HENNGE One is to find a good balance between providing a “just right” security solution that can operate intuitively without any special training (Zero Training) and not requiring deep cybersecurity knowledge (Minimum Literacy). I think the reason we lack a cybersecurity workforce is that there are fewer people in the workforce who have enough knowledge of cybersecurity. However, by making products that can operate with less knowledge of cybersecurity, I think there would be more people capable of operating products, and the shortage of the cybersecurity workforce would be eased.
These are 2 approaches we are taking in HENNGE One to deal with 2 major challenges the IT department faces.
Why security?
Lastly, some may wonder why we focus on security solutions even though our corporate philosophy is “Liberation of Technology”. Indeed, our passion to liberate technology is not only to provide security solutions but also to provide broader solutions. However, in order to provide such solutions, the base platform needs to be secure. This is the reason why we prioritized security solutions first. Eventually, I hope our company can provide a wider variety of solutions.
