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Diverse security and compliance requirements
The FCC Group prioritizes security in every engagement, ensuring measures are in place to protect client data whenever it begins a new project. With customers around the globe, it pays close attention to meeting evolving regulatory and certification requirements. These include the EU Network and Information Security (NIS) directive, which calls for segmentation and other protections for sensitive, critical information.
Coarse data center segmentation
To accomplish the company’s security and compliance goals, IT security leaders wanted to achieve segmentation granular enough to reduce the impact of breaches and prevent malware spread effectively. However, the organization determined that it could not easily or quickly accomplish this objective with its existing traditional firewall solution.
To address this challenge, the FCC Group began to search for a solution that would enable it to create and manage policies at the server level for its modern data center.
Selecting a solution
The FCC Group evaluated several solutions, but Akamai Guardicore Segmentation’s software-based segmentation approach distinguished itself in several ways. “Visibility and lateral movement detection were important when it came to the evaluation,” commented Edwin Blom, Chief Information Security Officer at FCC Group. “However, the most critical capability was the ability to isolate a single asset, or group of assets, with the click of a button during a security incident.”
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation fulfilled these requirements, and, in addition, the platform was straightforward to use and could easily be extended to the organization’s heterogeneous environment. This was critical since, though the business was primarily on-premises when the project began, cloud and container technology adoption was quickly ramping up and would need to be secured. Additionally, Guardicore would also enable the company to extend security to several legacy systems running critical workloads.
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation’s deployment was efficient, and the organization swiftly began to gain additional context into the network. This allowed the FCC Group to create informed segmentation policies to improve its security and compliance posture goals.
Comprehensive visibility
Before, it was impossible to see and understand the context of traffic inside the organization’s existing VLANs. “Once we implemented Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, we could identify all traffic patterns that were not only unnecessary but also were previously unknown. With Guardicore, we can detect traffic, eliminate it or, if it’s difficult to remove at the source, block it,” explained Blom.
Additionally, the newfound visibility helped the security team better understand potential risks in the network and validate that the organization’s servers, managed by a third party, are appropriately patched and that the latest antivirus version is installed.
Once we implemented Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, we could identify traffic patterns that were not only unnecessary but also were previously unknown.
Edwin Blom, Chief Information Security Officer, FCC Group
More effective segmentation
FCC has successfully been able to meet its goals with Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, separating traffic across business units and effectively isolating each one. The security team also applied additional segmentation policies to eliminate unnecessary communications between machines — significantly reducing the attack surface.
The team then further created a mechanism they refer to as the “red button”, which uses Akamai Guardicore Segmentation’s ability to create and enforce policies quickly. This policy template allows FCC Group responders to quickly isolate servers on the network if a breach or other security incident is suspected.
Detection and deception
To further improve security, suspicious lateral movement is now tracked and can be addressed with Akamai Guardicore Segmentation’s deception capabilities. This allows the FCC Group to isolate any bad actors in a high-interaction deception environment, keeping them away from sensitive assets while recording their techniques for further analysis. Additionally, because FCC Group has integrated Akamai Guardicore Segmentation with its SIEM solution, activity logs are available to help the team assess the possible impact of an attack and better respond to it.
Prepared for an evolving security and regulatory landscape
The organization plans to explore using Akamai Guardicore Segmentation for container security and its enhanced Insight feature, which allows teams to collect real-time context from all endpoints and servers, use it to make informed decisions and create new rules to address additional compliance requirements at the workload level.
However, no matter what the future holds, the additional layer of security provided by Akamai Guardicore Segmentation on top of the existing firewalls helps ensure the FCC Group is prepared for an evolving security and compliance landscape that increasingly calls for more granular segmentation.
About FCC Group
The FCC Group has provided environmental services for more than 110 years. It serves 66 million people in more than 5,000 municipalities in the world. It annually manages more than 23.5 million tons of waste as a resource, through a network that exceeds 200 environmental recovery and recycling centers.
About Akamai
Akamai powers and protects life online. Leading companies worldwide choose Akamai to build, deliver, and secure their digital experiences — helping billions of people live, work, and play every day. With the world’s most distributed compute platform — from cloud to edge — we make it easy for customers to develop and run applications, while we keep experiences closer to users and threats farther away. Learn more about Akamai’s security, compute, and delivery solutions at akamai.com and akamai.com/blog, or follow Akamai Technologies on Twitter and LinkedIn.