North P&I Club (North) is a leading mutual maritime liability insurer based in Newcastle upon Tyne with regional offices and subsidiaries in Australasia, China (Hong Kong and Shanghai), Greece, Ireland, Japan, Singapore and the USA. North’s IT department embraces modern technologies by creating leading-edge solutions to support over 350 staff across the globe on a 24/7 basis, enabling the shipowners we insure to trade with confidence.
North is protecting over 350 employees with Tessian Guardian and Tessian Enforcer.
“Working in insurance and dealing with claims, it’s vitally important that we control all our data and information very carefully.”
James Holmes
Chief Information Officer
The voyage beyond policy and training
“As you can imagine, in the shipping sector a lot of business is conducted on email.” James Holmes, Chief Information Officer at marine insurer North, has a broad range of priorities to tackle in his role. Until adopting Tessian, North had principally aimed to educate employees through policy and training initiatives. James saw that there was an opportunity for technological solutions to also play their part: “We have to acknowledge that people are going to make mistakes – we are human, after all – but at the same time we have to mitigate errors as much as we can.”
James was made aware of Tessian’s software through another Tessian customer, and was immediately impressed by the prospect of intelligently being able to identify misdirected emails before they happen. Insurance companies control many kinds of sensitive data, and James wanted to make sure data wouldn’t be put at risk because of human error. North’s IT team scoped out the market and found that Tessian would be the platform that best served the company’s needs. North’s cross-departmental Information Security Committee approved, and gave the green light for James’s team to deploy Tessian.
“I’ve had emails from employees around the company saying how intuitive and helpful Tessian has been. That’s a great validation of the technology and the value it brings.”
James Holmes
Chief Information Officer
Better email security with intelligent technology
James was eager to take advantage of the way Tessian impacts people’s behavior in the moment, prompting them to think carefully about potentially taking a dangerous action on email. “It’s about empowering people to make decisions having all salient information to hand.”
Since rolling out Tessian across the business, North has seen a number of employees receiving Tessian alerts and, as a result, double-checking emails to ensure mistakes are not made. Digesting Tessian’s reports on people’s alerts helps James to quantify the Guardian filter’s impact. “People can react in the moment to Tessian’s notifications and make the right decision for themselves and the business.”
“I saw the Tessian algorithm’s ability to learn and refine itself based on behaviors and communication patterns within the business as a significant advantage.”
James Holmes
Chief Information Officer
Encouraging cybersecurity oversight across the business
With more people working from home and using different devices to get work done, it’s important for companies in all industries to understand where new threats may emerge. James says, “We all know that personal addresses are more susceptible to hacking. Having technology that reminds people of the dangers of inappropriate data transfers is incredibly useful.”
Today, North is in the process of improving its data loss prevention capabilities by bringing in Tessian’s Enforcer filter. Enforcer identifies when sensitive data is being transferred out of an organization to personal or unauthorized addresses. Because of Enforcer’s importance when it comes to regulatory alignment, North’s risk and compliance team will take responsibility for managing the new filter.
Shipping is one of the oldest trades in the world, and marine insurance is moving quickly as a sector. By embedding best-in-class technology across the company and building out the organization’s suite of Tessian products, James is orienting North for longterm success.
Learn more about how Tessian prevents human error on email
Tessian is building the world’s first Human Layer Security platform to automatically secure all human-digital interactions within the enterprise. Today, our filters use stateful machine learning to protect people using email and to prevent threats like spear phishing, accidental data loss, data exfiltration and other non-compliant email activity. To book a demo and learn more about how we can help your organization, click here.
North Case Study
