Long View: Modernizing security alongside digital transformation

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Founded in Calgary in 1999, Long View Systems is a fast-growing Microsoft partner with a diverse skillset, recently distinguished as the Microsoft Enterprise Partner of the Year in Canada at Inspire 2017.

Growing organically from three employees during their founding to over 1,000 employees in 2017, Long View has found sustained success by combining business and technology through its Hybrid IT methodology. Over its 18 years doing business, Long View has evolved from a traditional value-added reseller (VAR) to become an innovative hybrid IT organization focused on creating transformative solutions using modern technologies and managing those solutions over time.

Long View has deep expertise across Microsoft technology, allowing it to be one of the few partners who can comfortably engineer end-to-end solutions for its customers across their business.

Modernizing security alongside digital transformation

As Long View helps shepherd its clients through their digital transformations, it uses its position as a strategic partner to advise these customers on how to maintain an effective, modern security posture.

“There is a complexity to [modern security] that many clients do not fully understand. We help our clients understand that to be truly secure, they need to do more than implement security solutions to protect their systems—they also need to be able to detect breaches and respond accordingly,” said Shane Weber, Principal Architect at Long View Systems.

Long View understands that responding to pending security threats is often a full-time job that clients are unable to adequately address internally. Implementing modern security technology solves for one piece of the puzzle, but ultimately, customers need a strategic partner willing to engage across the organization to ensure crucial data and intellectual property (IP) is secured.

Security and Microsoft 365

Long View was brought in to help a financial services customer with over 10,000 users operating across multiple geographies worldwide. When the customer initially approached Long View, it had just failed a 3^rd-party audit.

“The customer had a highly competent technical team, but didn’t fully understand modern security. They were unsure of what they were invested in and weren’t sure how to approach closing the gaps the audit had revealed in their security posture and infrastructure,” said Shane Weber.

Stepping in to help the customer, Long View first provided consulting services and workshops to help the customer understand current state, gaps to close, and recommended state. Long View’s consultants helped the customer better understand the breadth of security services it required—everything from securing identity and access, universal endpoints, and information protection to address how the customer’s employees securely collaborated and shared information internally and externally. Long View worked with the customer’s legal, financial, and accounting teams to ensure the customer wouldn’t be the next high-profile firm in the news for an important data breach. Long View helped the customer understand that modernizing its security was a crucial aspect of its transformation and that it needed a comprehensive technology solution in place to get there.

“It is fairly new for most customers to understand modern security—having a great firewall and network protection is not enough anymore. In a cloud-first, mobile-first business world, a lot more happens on the edge now, where security threats are a lot different from before. We work to help customers understand what they need now is a true end to end solution and program—not just technology,” said Shane Weber.

Long View and the customer ultimately chose to implement Microsoft 365 to securely improve how its employees worked and collaborated with one another. Long View also worked to enhance the security services from the offering, adding layers of protection over time as the team became more familiar with the customer’s environment. Ultimately, Microsoft 365 represented an opportunity for the customer to not only modernize its security posture but transform how its employees did business.

“Microsoft 365 is a fully integrated security solution that is highly differentiated in the marketplace across all aspects of what our customers require from a Unified Endpoint Management , collaboration, productivity, and security solution. It allows our customers to protect themselves against threats, while allowing them to react and respond to potential breaches. Ultimately, the solution enables our customers to be proactive and digitally-enabled, as well as highly productive and collaborative in a trusted way,” said Shane Weber.

By implementing Microsoft 365, Long View enabled a digital transformation for its customer, addressing security gaps and modernizing how its employees did business while protecting data and privacy. Long View—in partnership with Microsoft—quickly fulfilled the client’s business requirements on a tight timeline, modernizing the customer’s security posture in only six weeks.

The impact to the customer was significant, as a single cyber security breach could cost the client an average of USD2.4 million in addition to the significant damage to the business’ reputation in the financial services industry. By working to prevent these breaches, Long View mitigated against these potential damages while adding additional value-added services—positioning itself as a strategic partner to the customer.

 “Microsoft 365 is a transformational solution for our customers. Microsoft has given us a lot of ability to embed with our customers by offering this fully integrated solution. Microsoft has a great platform that partners can plug into and the majority of our enterprise customers are already working with Microsoft which makes for a natural partnership. Our advice to other partners is to build out your own services and solutions around Microsoft’s technology to drive business outcomes for clients,” said Shane Weber.