Facq was founded in 1880 as a family business, and sells and distributes a broad range of bathroom, sanitary, and heating products.

Facq is one of those remarkable Belgian organizations that know how to turn challenges into opportunities. That 40 years (!) of experience surely has something to do with it. For collaboration and communication between colleagues, Facq relied on open source digital tools such as Open Office and Mozilla Thunderbird. Then COVID-19 appeared on the scene.

Facq immediately rolled out Microsoft Teams for direct communication between colleagues who were all working from home during the lockdown. Because they were open to discovering new applications, we were happy to guide them through their Microsoft Teams journey.

It wasn't hard to convince Facq's management of the benefits of Microsoft 365. There were, however, two aspects they were very keen to get right: security and user adoption.

Cybercrime is on the rise worldwide. That's why we set up Microsoft Exchange and Outlook as Facq's new email service, and added a layer of security with multi-factor authentication (MFA). If a hacker somehow managed to steal credentials and log into one of the nearly 900 employee email accounts, MFA would quickly catch them out.

As soon as a login attempt is made from outside the Facq network, the employee in question automatically receives a phone call to confirm (or deny) that they are indeed the person trying to log in.

Another security component of the solution detects and alerts Facq's IT staff as soon as a successful login attempt is made from outside the expected geographic zone. This proved its worth early on, even before MFA was implemented.

IT received an alert about an employee who was apparently trying to log in from Croatia. That sounded plausible, since he was on holiday. Still, the IT staff followed zero-trust principles. They immediately blocked access. That turned out to be the right call. Their colleague was not in Croatia and had indeed been hacked. Facq was able to sort things out right away and contacted the employee about the incident. Together, they looked at how to successfully prevent a similar incident in the future, and how he could play an active role in that.

Providing Facq's IT staff with effective tools was reflected in our choice of the cloud-based Microsoft Intune solution as the newest tool for endpoint deployment and management.

Previously, setting up and deploying a new device for employees was a time-consuming process. Applications had to be installed and configured manually, one by one, which could easily take an hour of follow-up per device. Thanks to the setup we designed for Facq, any computer supplier delivering a device can now easily connect it to Facq's Intune in the cloud. When the device arrives at Facq, IT staff only need five minutes for a small configuration step before the end user can get started.

That naturally leads to an impressive reduction in workload, but it also gives Facq the ability to organize its security approach strategically. With Intune, Facq can guarantee company-wide and group-specific device compliance: from hard drive encryption to conditional access settings for devices (such as MFA), antivirus requirements, operating system requirements, and much more.

Andy Valgaerts, IT Engineer at Facq: "Xylos listens, understands our needs, and adapts to them. But never without giving their own honest input, which makes them trustworthy. There's no blind execution in the Xylos process. The collaboration is great, especially on a human level."