Meet Landis+Gyr

Four years ago, Edward Levin, Director of Cybersecurity at Landis+Gyr, discovered Island. Since then, he’s never looked back. “Island is the only tool where, every day, I find there’s more to it,” Levin says. “Island gives a lot. And the more you give, the more it gives back.” His employer, Landis+Gyr, is headquartered in Switzerland and was founded in 1896 to manufacture electric meters. Today, more than a century later, Landis+Gyr is trusted by more than 3,500 utilities worldwide and is an energy technology leader delivering intelligent solutions that connect devices, data, and decisions across the grid.

Contractor Control

One key application for Island has been bolstering security for Landis+Gyr’s third-party contractors. The company works with about 400 contractors from nearly 80 third-party suppliers. Most were using secure VPNs. “That left too many gateways into our company,” Levin says. “We wanted only one door.” 

Levin is now supplying the contractors with Island, not just as a browser, but as what he calls a next-gen VPN. In fact, Levin has found Island to be even more powerful than a VPN, as it gives him full control over data flows from source to destination. It controls the source at a precise executable level rather than at a broad system level. “I knew, pretty much from the get-go, that Island had more benefits than just a browser,” Levin says. 

Artificial intelligence is helping, too. Levin’s team has created AI agents to help the company’s Island administrators. Because different groups within Landis+Gyr use Island differently, the AI agents have been trained on each group’s documentation. Now, when an admin needs to help a user, they can ask the AI agent for a department-specific suggestion.

GenAI security is another related concern. So Levin and his team use Island to block users from copy-pasting out of the popular ChatGPT chatbot. “Now AI is less of a boogeyman,” Levin says.