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The customer
This global company provides automobile financing in the United States, Latin America, Canada, Europe, and China.
The challenge
Reduce lateral movement
The organization was concerned that a breach would go undetected and lead to protracted dwell time, giving bad actors opportunities to access its critical applications and data. It was time to reduce risk and improve the company’s overall security posture. Therefore, the automobile finance provider began evaluating technologies that could prevent lateral movement and secure access to the company’s widespread critical assets across multiple geographies, environment types, and legacy systems.
The solution
Initially, the company attempted to achieve its goals using traditional segmentation approaches, including firewalls, VMware NSX, and VLANs. However, those technologies could not provide adequate visibility into east-west traffic or enforce segmentation consistently across all infrastructure types, including AWS and legacy systems.
The company also evaluated Cisco Tetration. But, ultimately, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation was selected as the fastest and most straightforward way to address lateral movement concerns and lower risk.
As an IT security leader at the organization explained, “Guardicore did in two hours what Cisco could not accomplish in four weeks.”
Guardicore did in two hours what Cisco could not accomplish in four weeks.
IT Security Leader at Global Auto Finance Provider
The results
Improved visibility
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation’s visibility meant the company had increased confidence that it could quickly detect an infrastructure breach and prevent movement that could lead to significant data exfiltration. Moreover, this same insight into east-west traffic and application communications allowed the company’s security team to accelerate policy creation.
Consistent policy enforcement
The software-defined approach of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is independent from the underlying infrastructure. Thus, the platform also enabled the finance provider to enforce segmentation for critical workloads, no matter where they reside in the environment, on-premises, or onAWS.
Security at scale
The company was pleased that it could achieve effective segmentation without disrupting business. Because Guardicore doesn’t require network or application changes to create and enforce new security policies, the business can quickly scale as its needs evolve, making sure that security keeps pace with innovation.
The organization plans to continue to secure its critical assets by using Akamai Guardicore Segmentation to enforce environment segmentation as a first step to control east-west traffic movement. The next step in the plan is to leverage the platform’s microsegmentation capabilities moving forward.