A lean regional team, global standards to uphold, and headquarters eight time zones away.
Client: Marubeni Corporation (Japanese Conglomerate)
Sector: Industrial / Global Trading
Service: End-to-End Network & Security Managed Services (L1–L2)
The situation
Marubeni runs Middle East operations across multiple offices on a deliberately lean on-ground IT team – while global headquarters in Japan owns L3 and enforces a single global IT governance and security standard. The mismatch showed: network slowdowns, delayed incident response and limited local support were disrupting daily operations, and keeping regional performance aligned with HQ’s policies was getting harder as the business grew.
The operating model
Flint stepped in as Marubeni’s extended regional IT partner, taking full L1–L2 ownership and slotting cleanly into the existing global structure. Responsibilities were drawn so nothing fell between the regions and Japan:
Flint – regional, L1-L2 |
Marubeni HQ, Japan – L3 |
| Firewalls, switches and desktop systems
Video-conferencing & collaboration support Proactive maintenance, patching, health checks Local rapid response on the ground |
Global IT governance & security policy
L3 incident ownership Standards Flint operates and reports against Escalations received via a defined framework |
Running it day to day
Onboarding started with discovery – mapping the network topology, security policies, asset inventory and existing performance gaps against HQ’s standards and escalation workflows. Flint then stabilized operations: monitoring tools, SOPs and maintenance cycles in place, firewalls, switches and endpoints optimized. From there it became continuous – ongoing L1-L2 support, incident management, performance reporting and SLA adherence, with clean handover of L3 incidents to Japan and consistent security and compliance held across every regional site.
What changed
Outages and performance issues across the regional offices dropped markedly. Continuous monitoring and timely remediation lifted the overall security posture, local presence plus an integrated escalation path sped up incident turnaround, and Marubeni’s teams were freed to focus on commercial priorities rather than keeping the lights on – with global alignment intact throughout.
AI-Driven Managed Services This is managed services with intelligence built in: Flint augments the L1–L2 operation with AI that automates routine tasks and sharpens network visibility, so a lean regional team resolves more, faster – while L3 coordination with Japan stays clean.
