UK Gaming Firm William Hill Deploys PGP Disk Encryption

PGP Corporation announced that William Hill Organisation PLC, a betting and gaming company based in the United Kingdom, has implemented the PGP Encryption Platform for strategic data protection on laptops and to position itself for future encryption solutions.

William Hill handles client funds and must protect the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive financial and client information, both in transit and at rest. William Hill worked with PGP Silver Partner Gradian Systems Ltd to implement PGP Universal Server and deploy PGP Whole Disk Encryption to laptops used by field employees. The solution replaces a point product that slowed laptop performance and reduced William Hill’s ability to comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) requirements.

Founded in 1934, William Hill is a market leader in all major betting channels for wagers on sporting events, online casino games, interactive bingo, and other amusements in the UK with over 14,000 employees, more than 2,000 betting offices, and an established international presence in many countries through its online businesses, processing over 1 Million bets per day in its shops, on the phone, and over the Internet.

William Hill is a Tier-1 PCI vendor that must comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) requirements. It also must consider the UK Gambling Commission Remote Technical Standards (RTS), which were developed in line with the ISO 27001 standard.

William Hill shifted toward a formal enterprise data protection strategy and found that its existing full-disk encryption product would not support an integrated, centrally manageable security architecture. Users also complained that the encryption product slowed laptop performance. Working with Gradian Systems Ltd., William Hill replaced the previous product with PGP Whole Disk Encryption, a component of the PGP Encryption Platform.

"We want just one, central management server that can control all encryption applications, rather than lots of dispersed, siloed environments," said Nick Copley, Information Systems Security Manager at William Hill. "With the PGP Encryption Platform we get whole disk encryption, and can utilize the benefits of the PGP encryption in other information areas in a holistic, single-vendor platform approach."

Designed to support strategic enterprise data protection, the extensible PGP Encryption Platform allows William Hill to meet its immediate need for a whole disk encryption solution, while positioning itself to deploy more encryption applications in the future and manage all of them from a single instance of the platform.

The previous full-disk encryption product caused deployment to be time consuming. The lack of remote manageability in the existing full-disk product required William Hill to physically recall every laptop to manually decrypt data and de-install the software before loading the PGP Whole Disk Encryption agent. Setup and configuration of PGP Universal Server and integration with Microsoft Active Directory went quickly and smoothly.

Now William Hill anticipates that the company can take advantage of the remote deployment capabilities of PGP® software as it adds new laptops. And because PGP Whole Disk Encryption operates automatically in the background, it requires no user training, saving time, money, and resources. William Hill plans to leverage the extensible PGP solution to protect its increasing security and regulatory postures.