Customer Success Story:

JAFCO drives a work-style revolution with NetMotion’s ‘unbreakable connectivity’

JAFCO Co., Ltd., is a Japan-based powerhouse private equity firm with over $3 billion invested in biotech, electronics, IT services and more. Since its founding in 1973, the company has been involved in more than 1,000 IPOs in Japan and abroad.

The Challenges

In 2017 JAFCO decided that it needed to help its employees adapt to the changing economy. With its gradual shift towards a portfolio focused on early-stage investments –particularly in the IT Services sector– JAFCO realized that its employees desired more flexibility in the way they worked. They were dealing with more off-site meetings, yet they still needed access to critical business data and applications while they were away from the office.

With this mobility came an important challenge. Parts of JAFCO’s internal systems, such as its CRM database, contain highly confidential information. The company had been relying on a VPN solution with an onerous 3-step login process that generated a lot of complaints from employees. Because of this, JAFCO decided on two key priorities: ensuring data integrity and security on endpoint and client devices, and enabling ease of use for its mobile workforce.

The Solution

The company embarked on a radical plan to eliminate fixed seating at its offices and gave its mobile workforce the tools they needed to create a more productive and efficient work environment. As part of its digital transformation, working hours were also made completely flexible, giving employees the freedom to work from anywhere at any time.

JAFCO chose NetMotion for its powerful and easily configurable mobile VPN. Once deployed across the company’s network and mobile devices, employees could securely access highly sensitive documents from anywhere, even when visiting customers.

Since implementing NetMotion, I’m happy to say that we’ve seen absolutely no problems and no complaints from our employees
Narutomo Matsuo, CIO, JAFCO

We soon discovered the performance benefits of NetMotion. We did an early rollout to our IT staff to help iron out any issues, but thanks to not requiring hardware, they were able to adjust configurations and get NetMotion up and running very quickly.
Narutomo Matsuo, CIO JAFCO

The Results

NetMotion quickly became indispensable to JAFCO’s infrastructure. Users had been concerned about the possible impact of compression on video quality, however NetMotion’s proprietary end-to-end data encryption, application prioritization and compression technologies won employees over with secure and stutter-free video conferencing and other data-intensive applications, even over 4G connections.

Narutomo Matsuo, JAFCO’s CIO explained that he considered five or six other solutions, but he found them to be either lacking in features or too expensive. NetMotion allows employees to log into internal systems without multiple steps.

Since deploying the NetMotion company-wide, the company is proud that it has been able to build a stress-free environment for employees, while giving them complete access to the internal systems they need.

JAFCO is currently considering ways to expand its adoption of NetMotion. The company is excited about what it has achieved so far in improving employee efficiency and the overall work environment. It is now turning its attention to making more improvements, not only for itself but also for the companies in which it invests.

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