DAZN Group

About DAZN Group

DAZN Group is the digital leader in global sports media and one of the fastest growing sports media companies in the world. Headquartered in the UK and with almost 3,000 employees in over 30 countries, our businesses touch every aspect of the way fans engage with sports from broadcast planning and production through to content distribution and commercialization.

DAZN Group consists of two distinct consumer and B2B brands: DAZN and Perform. The consumer division is home to DAZN, the world's first pure-sport live and on-demand streaming service, as well as some of the most popular sports websites, including Goal, Sporting News, and Spox. DAZN is leading the charge to give sports fans around the world access to sport anytime, anywhere. DAZN guarantees no long-term contract, just one affordable price for access on TVs, smartphones, tablets, games consoles, and PCs. DAZN is live in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with Spain and Brazil launching in early 2019. Visit https://www.dazn.com/ for more information.

Gaining More Control Over Security

Daniel Schatz, DAZN’s CISO, knew he needed to do more. His organization had made significant investments in endpoint anti-virus and network-based security, but the success of these tools depended on them being properly installed and active on all endpoints and network locations across DAZN’s infrastructure. In addition, compliance was a challenge; there were users who were not running updated versions of the anti-virus on their laptops or devices, leading to increased security risk. Daniel needed to address this shortcoming.

The Need to Stop the Spread of Infection

Cyber threats needed to be quickly identified, isolated, and removed. With the growing sophistication of cybercriminals, it was getting more difficult to do so. Although many threats were stopped by existing security measures, some still got through. Those that did demanded significant effort to remedy. One compromised laptop could infect several others, each of which needed to be tracked down, cleaned, and rebuilt — taking several hours of a security professional’s time, not to mention the lost productivity of the user. The assault from malware, ransomware, and phishing was never-ending, creating a drain on resources. And the specter of a serious breach, with all its negative financial, regulatory, and public relations repercussions, was constantly hovering over the organization.

A Quick Win with Akamai

After careful evaluation, Daniel selected Akamai’s Secure Internet Access Enterprise to monitor and block malicious DNS requests, adding another layer of proactive security. One key aspect of this decision was the high quality of Akamai’s threat intelligence. This intelligence is gleaned from Akamai’s unprecedented view of Internet IP and DNS traffic which detects active threats and delivers minimal false positive security alerts.

Additionally, the deployment of Secure Internet Access Enterprise was simple and straightforward, only requiring a change to forward DNS traffic from DAZN’s existing DNS servers to Akamai’s cloud platform. This change was completed in just a few hours.

Creating a Better Security Posture

The benefits were immediate. Using Akamai Secure Internet Access Enterprise, Daniel’s security team now has an intuitive dashboard that allows them to identify potential security problems. “We can finally see what all [of] our computers are doing and take appropriate action,” he noted.

In addition to the real-time threat intelligence provided by Secure Internet Access Enterprise, DAZN’s security team can quickly and easily integrate threat intelligence from other sources as well. This allows them to leverage existing resources and efficiently block threats across DAZN’s global network in minutes. They can stop the spread of a threat without requiring any action on the part of end users, creating a much more resilient security posture.

Daniel highlights an interesting discovery: the amount of previously undetected cryptocurrency mining that Secure Internet Access Enterprise exposed.

With Secure Internet Access Enterprise, Daniel’s group has uncovered more malicious traffic on their network than anticipated, but they also have fewer false positives. As a result, their efforts are focused on real dangers, wasting less time on outdated or stale threat information. This means that the security team now has the bandwidth to look at higher-value projects.

Future Direction

Akamai’s roadmap for Secure Internet Access Enterprise is of keen interest to Daniel’s group, and they believe they have selected the right partner for the future. DAZN is currently working with Akamai to add additional functionality to redirect and monitor endpoints that request suspicious domains, for even faster problem resolution.