Data integration leader chooses Expel for responsive, scalable, managed security

This organization helps teams prepare and process their data efficiently. Thousands of enterprises trust them with their data integration needs for a wide range of use cases, from insights and operational analytics to data science, machine learning, and AI. Their platform integrates with cloud data platforms to let data teams at every skill level automate management, refinement, and data delivery for every data integration need.

As the company’s customers increasingly adopted a cloud-first approach, its security requirements evolved to handle more users, increasingly complex use cases, and larger cloud workloads. “Initially, our business model involved software that customers deployed in their own infrastructure, which allowed us to expand very quickly, and also make sure that our customers had full data sovereignty,” explains their Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). “As customers migrated to SaaS applications, we had to continually evolve our strategy to protect new infrastructure that was available to attacks.”

Protecting data in the cloud is vital—even more so because of the company’s rapid global expansion. Its growing roster of enterprise customers increasingly scrutinized the company’s own security defenses.

“Enterprise customers demand rock-solid security and do much more due diligence,” the CISO says. As a rapidly growing company with a powerful infrastructure spanning multiple countries, the security requirements had become dramatically more sophisticated.

Central to all of these issues was the dizzying pace with which the threat landscape evolves. A commitment to detecting and countering the latest threat innovations was critical to information security standards.

As the CISO notes, their industry is a massive addressable market for their company—and with data growing at an exponential rate, the company is well-positioned to win more customers, assuming their IT decision-makers had confidence in their cloud security. That confidence, the CISO believed, could be won with a managed services offering like Expel’s managed detection and response (MDR).

At the time that the organization considered a new security provider, it had a small team of security experts and “capacity management was an absolute driver for the decision,” the CISO says. In a previous role, he’d built a security operations team from scratch. “Building the security operation yourself is challenging to scale,” he says. “I wanted a responsive solution that could scale with our needs, that would integrate with the systems we had already, and give me 24×7 coverage.”

The CISO expected to bring in technology that would stay ahead of the security curve. “It’s important that any security technology we bring on board evolves along with us,” he says. A cloud-native solution was also key. “Our platform runs on cloud infrastructure,” he adds, “and it was really important that we had the ability to ingest our cloud platform logs.”

Through contacts in the venture capital world, the CISO learned of Expel MDR, which met all of his expectations for a managed solution to take on the heavy lifting of cloud security, while supporting the company as it innovated new features.

“Expel connects to our existing technology and is ready for the cloud. That was a huge selling point as well,” the CISO says.

Expel provided the precise and effective security protections that the organization’s customers and prospects demand—practically overnight.

“After a short proof of concept, it took about a day to get set up, then we rolled straight into the service,” he says. The speed made a difference in terms of obtaining an ISO certification shortly after the company began using Expel MDR. “Expel helped us achieve those certifications,” the CISO says. “It’s a differentiator for us among other vendors in our space.”

Expel’s ease of integration with many endpoint security solutions gives security teams the freedom to choose the best tools for their tech stack, with no training needed for those new solutions. The CISO didn’t have to re-architect, re-deploy, or re-integrate the environment thanks to Expel’s integration strategy, saving time for the growing security team, which relies on Expel MDR to automate alerts and deliver only the most relevant and critical for review.

“We only see the alerts that matter,” the CISO says. “We can get the alerts any way we want them.” He adds, “We end up with the optimal starting points, so we know what questions to ask. That means we reduce the time to resolution.”

Soon after the company deployed Expel MDR across their cloud, endpoint and Office applications, Expel announced support for Kubernetes (k8s) environments. “The timing of the MDR for container orchestration was ideal. We just started to develop with that technology when we learned Expel added support for various container service platforms,” says the Cloud Security Lead. “Expel’s integrations were on point when we started working with them, but we were curious to see how they would adapt as our own capabilities evolved. We were thrilled to see that Expel was in lockstep with our move into the Kubernetes space.”

Expel integrates Kubernetes environments into their platform, affording the organization an easy decision. “We built trust with Expel. The container technology was new to us, but we understood how their system worked, the alerting logic and the philosophy behind the platform, so ingesting that data into the platform made sense.” As a result, their cloud security team doesn’t need to be container orchestration experts to generate useful insights. This allows the security team to have more meaningful conversations with the company’s developers.

Benefits of partnering with Expel

• Access to the latest security innovations
• Integrations with many endpoints for more visibility
• Saves time for the growing security team to focus beyond detection and response
• Rapid onboarding allowing immediate service delivery
  Automation that streamlines visibility to the alerts that matter

As the organization adds companies around the world to its customer roster, the quality of its cloud security is helping to close deals. “Expel helps us foster growth by reducing friction in sales,” the CISO says.

They are also benefiting from Expel’s MDR innovation, another key pillar for the CISO. Because the company has quickly recognized the value of Expel, it’s become a design partner to help influence Expel’s forthcoming innovations. “We want the bleeding edge of technology in our managed security services and we get that with Expel,” the CISO says.

The partnership between this organization and Expel is also an excellent matchup in terms of values and culture. “We’re a value-driven company, and we have been since the very beginning,” the CISO says. “We don’t just stick the value statement on the wall—we practise care, integrity, and we’re customer-obsessed on a daily basis, just like Expel. We know that we can’t do security poorly and also live by those values.”