JR-WEST's i-FILTER Introduction Case Study
— Securing web access by station staff through category filtering on tablets —

Information security solutions provider Digital Arts Inc. (headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan; CEO: Toshio Dogu; hereinafter referred to as “Digital Arts”; Code 2326) is pleased to announce that on May 25, it released a case study of the introduction of the cloud-based web security product i-FILTER@Cloud Measures Against Harmful Information Edition by West Japan Railway Company (Head Office: Osaka City, Osaka Prefecture; President: Kazuaki Hasegawa; hereinafter “JR-WEST”).

Responsible for infrastructure critical to cities in western Japan, JR West sees information security as one of many important management issues

JR-WEST is a company in charge of social infrastructure with a railroad network serving 18 prefectures across western Japan. In addition, they operate a real estate business in the form of developments in and around stations in cooperation with local governments, and a distribution business by running retail stores and restaurants mainly in and around stations.

As they are responsible for such critical pieces of infrastructure, they have made information security a management issue they are currently tackling in response to ever more sophisticated attacks, growing threats, and an increase in vulnerabilities due to the adoption of working from home and digital transformation (DX). Specifically, they promote organizational measures such as the Information Security Committee and Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT), individual measures such as education and training for management, employees and system administrators, and technical measures such as the introducing security tools.

As part of the technical measures, they have implemented Mobile Device Management (MDM) and a secure connection to their closed internal network for station staff tablets, which are used in various situations such as providing customer guidance.

i-FILTER@Cloud Measures Against Harmful Information Edition installed on 3,715 station staff tablets

When introducing new station staff tablets, MDM filters were initially considered as they had been used on previously introduced crew member tablets.

However, station staff tablets are unique in that they are also used to provide information to passengers at stations and thus need to be able to access various websites, including tourist information and other transport company sites. As websites needed to be accessed were situational and the number grew daily, filtering them by whitelisting and blacklisting would have taken too long and not been suitable for the station staff tablets. This led them to choosing i-FILTER@Cloud Measures Against Harmful Information Edition as it has the ability to filter by category.

A total of 3,715 iPads have been distributed to stations across the JR-WEST service area to be used as station staff tablets. The tablets are shared among staff at each station. i-FILTER@Cloud Measures Against Harmful Information Edition has been installed on all station staff tablets to restrict access to certain websites.

With i-FILTER@Cloud Measures Against Harmful Information Edition, filters can be set by category to block websites unrelated to work and phishing websites. The system is capable of various features, including the ability to restrict search terms on major search sites, and has been highly praised for its ability to restrict access to inappropriate sites without compromising convenience.

For the full case study on the West Japan Railway Company
https://www.daj.jp/bs/case/case95/