Hybrid integration platform supplier reinvigorates security operations

Enterprises are fixated on the customer experience—and its associated demands for data security and privacy—as a path to success. Axway empowers these enterprises to embrace the task of responsibly stewarding data with infrastructure solutions that securely aggregate data from anywhere, connecting individuals, systems, business and customer ecosystems to provide the best customer experience possible.

Michael Christensen, Director of Cyber Security at Axway Software, has the responsibility to ensure that the company’s infrastructure adheres to established security policies and that security operation centers (SOC) are effectively handling internal and external threats.

Pitted against a landscape of ever-proliferating cyber threats and a cyber security knowledge curve that seems to increase exponentially each year, Axway wanted to optimize available resources to enhance the company’s security posture. Christensen contemplated hiring headcount to bolster Axway’s SOCs but after considering the cost, decided to search for a managed detection and response service instead.

Christensen elaborated, “Our goal was to find a security provider we could rely on; We knew that without great threat intelligence and knowledgeable people behind the scenes evaluating data to identify and understand the real issues triggering alerts, many solutions are not necessarily helping customers.”

Finding a Security Provider Focused on Security Strategy

To narrow down options, Christensen focused attention on providers that extended their focus beyond operational support to include an emphasis on security strategy, which led Axway to Mandiant and Trellix. “I knew there was a passion and a drive behind both organizations to provide a really strong understanding of the security landscape and to help us find ways to be proactive and not just reactively respond to events that might occur in our infrastructure,” enthused Christensen.

Leveraging Legacy Tools Alongside Frontline Threat Intelligence

Recollecting the immediate benefits of Trellix XDR, Christensen appreciated the simplicity and ease of use provided from the fully Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-hosted platform. “I’ve seen a number of different SIEMtype products; Trellix XDR is very different. The initial set up is much simpler than any other solution I’ve experienced, and we could easily navigate the interface to find the information we needed.”

Christensen cited the regular rollout of new features and perpetual evolution of Trellix XDR as notable indications of a superior platform. By using AWS services as the building blocks for scalable storage (S3), compute (EC2), and container management (Fargate), Axway is able to receive product updates at the speed of cloud delivery, decreasing downtime and resulting in a lower total cost of ownership.

Christensen also appreciated the flexibility of Trellix XDR to integrate with other solutions from Trellix, as well as other companies’ products. He explained, “The reality for us is that we’ve already invested in specific tools that can’t just be thrown away. The great thing about Trellix XDR though is that it’s easy to integrate with existing tools so that you can continue relying on your established sources of information. The option to swap in additional Trellix solutions at any time always remains.”

Trellix XDR provides Christensen with a centralized source of threat intelligence gathered from multiple solutions deployed across the company. This comprehensive perspective, covering critical threat vectors—including email, network and endpoint— also ensures that the most suspicious activities can be rapidly isolated for immediate review by Mandiant Managed Defense.

As a recent example, an employee’s inadvertent mistake resulted in a targeted phishing attack. Trellix XDR quickly identified and confined the threat, and the company’s IT security department was able to work with the Mandiant Managed Defense team to minimize the incident’s impact.

“The great thing was, the Mandiant Managed Defense team dedicated another two weeks to validate that we had uncovered the full scope of the attack in the first 24 hours and that nothing else had happened. They talked with our team every day just to make sure we had collected the right information, and understood how to defend our environment moving forward,” recounted Christensen.

He highlighted this focus on incident response and mitigating the potential for larger breaches as a differentiator for Mandiant: “The Mandiant Managed Defense team helps us identify very specific details about the threats we encounter and insight into how to address any potential vulnerabilities,” remarked Christensen. “This gives us a greater understanding of our environment and how to best secure it.”

Aligning with a Security Powerhouse

Reflecting on Axway’s overall experience with Trellix and Mandiant, Christensen concluded, “Trellix and Mandiant are security powerhouses. Bringing in Trellix and Mandiant gave us the opportunity to reevaluate how we do things as a company, and to align our thinking with the worldclass expertise behind Trellix solutions and Mandiant services. The relationship we developed with Trellix and Mandiant have become a driving force in improving our overall security posture.”