Mitsubishi Gas Chemical

Mitsubishi Gas Chemical eliminates connectivity issues and reduces department remote connection expenses by 75% with Cloudflare

Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Company (MGC) is a unique technology-oriented manufacturer producing more than 90% of its products using proprietary technologies. Committing itself to creating new technology and value, MGC boasts a broad range of products, from basic chemicals such as methanol, xylene, hydrogen peroxide, to high performance products such as engineering plastics, materials for printed wiring boards, and oxygen absorbers. Under its mission, “Creating value to share with society”, MGC contributes to societal growth and harmony by creating a wide range of value through chemistry.

Cumbersome and inefficient workarounds over IP restrictions

With an increasing number of employees working remotely or traveling overseas, MGC needed a reliable, secure way to access corporate resources and third‑party services from anywhere in the world.

MGC’s Manager of the Information Systems Division, says, “Avoiding security incidents — or minimizing their impact — is the top priority, since even a single incident could significantly damage the company’s reputation”.

Prior solutions — Netskope at headquarters and Zscaler across group companies — were costly and complex to operate and caused access difficulties.

For example, one of their previous providers was unable to issue a global egress IP. This led to remote employees sometimes having to route through the corporate network, turn off their work setup and use an unprotected residential connection — or even go to the office just to reach work-specific websites. The team also spent significant time troubleshooting connection issues and re‑routing traffic through the on‑premises network.

In some cases, employees forgot to start the security client after boot, leaving web traffic temporarily unprotected and generating a higher volume of support tickets.

A flexible solution that keeps a large fleet of remote devices secure

Concerned about the high costs of their current providers and the difficulties of keeping their workforce secure and connected, MGC began looking for alternatives.

Cloudflare stood out for their affordable pricing structure, straightforward deployment, and a global network that could provide consistent egress IP addresses.

“The lower cost and the ability to access from anywhere globally via Cloudflare’s infrastructure led us to make a decision to migrate to Cloudflare,” the division manager says.

MGC now uses Cloudflare Zero Trust to facilitate network access and protect internal applications with strong, identity‑aware controls. The approach differs between the main company and subsidiaries. MGC itself enforces Device Posture rules to restrict access to company‑issued Windows PCs that meet strict conditions.

The group companies, on the other hand, employ a less rigid approach based on application and port restrictions (without Device Posture rules) to account for the variety of devices that need access. This keeps policies clear for users while ensuring that only compliant devices can reach sensitive systems.

In addition, the team migrated existing DNS categories and policies to Cloudflare Gateway, taking advantage of Cloudflare’s global network and the privacy‑centric 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. With Gateway, MGC can enforce DNS and HTTP filtering consistently and reduce the number of policies they have to manage themselves.

"I had heard Cloudflare's DNS filtering was a strong security measure, but in our experience, it is blocking access to malicious sites more effectively than Netskope or even Cloudflare's own HTTP filtering," the division manager adds.

With the current setup, employees are able to connect quickly and reliably, no matter where they are working from. The client automatically connects, requests authentication, and displays a clear “on” state, improving both security and usability.

“Cloudflare assigned us global egress IPs, so we no longer have to use the previous complex setups,” the division manager explains. “Operations became much easier, and both convenience and security improved.”

Cloudflare Digital Experience Monitoring (DEX) makes it easy to see where access originates worldwide, and the team cites Cloudflare Dashboard as being more robust than the one provided by their previous vendor, letting them get insights into user bandwidth usage. The team also uses WARP‑to‑WARP support features to assist employees traveling or working overseas.

“When we used Netskope, we sometimes ran into errors that prevented connection. Since switching to Cloudflare, we haven’t had those issues at all, and the UI is also very intuitive,” the division manager concludes.

Stable and transparent infrastructure allowing the team to eliminate inefficient spending

Before adopting Cloudflare, MGC spent a lot of valuable IT time verifying internal network routing and communication, which could take up to 40 hours per month.

“We were constantly scrambling to investigate logs after end users reported connectivity issues, and had to make changes so all traffic would pass through the corporate network. And even then, that wouldn’t always work,” the division manager explains. “Now, all of that has been completely eliminated.”

MGC were also able to report significant cost reductions by consolidating with Cloudflare Zero Trust and reducing the number of security policies they maintain.

“Because Cloudflare is so stable, we don’t need to do anything. This has increased the productivity of the security department,” says the division manager.

Because the team found Cloudflare’s configuration process to be straightforward, they did not need to hire a separate implementation vendor, which consequently lowered overall deployment effort and cost.

“Some employees expressed concerns about moving to a different system. They had already been using Netskope for about two years and saw it as an additional burden,” the division manager says. “We distributed materials showing that implementing Cloudflare Zero Trust would reduce their department’s remote connection expenses to one quarter of what they were before (a 75% reduction), which helped win their support.”

With Premium Success, MGC has direct access to Cloudflare experts, who help convey nuances in Japanese that would have been lost if the team had to communicate in English or through another third party. This significantly increased communication efficiency during rollout, allowing both MGC and their group companies to fully complete the migration process within just seven months after the initial preparations and PoC phase.

Looking out into a more observable and secure future with Cloudflare

Pleased with both the integration procedure and the results that working with Cloudflare has netted so far, the MGC team is excited about the prospect of using additional services in the future. “Implementing Zero Trust gave us the opportunity to learn about other services Cloudflare offers.” says the division manager, explaining that they are particularly interested in paid log management and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to help strengthen information protection, and are currently looking for ways to efficiently integrate these into their existing frameworks.