How FICO Gained Visibility and Control to Secure its Atomized Network
By Netography Team
Most people think of FICO as a credit scoring company, but today the company has innovated into a leading analytics software company with its award-winning digital decisioning platform that helps organizations optimize their customer interactions in real-time. Businesses in 90+ countries, including half of the top 100 banks in the world and one-third of the top U.S. retailers, use FICO to help power their decisions and prosper, so it’s critical that the underlying infrastructure remains secure and optimized.
Recently, Matt Wilson, VP, Product Management, Netography sat down with Shannon Ryan, Sr. Director, Core Security Services and Architecture, FICO to discuss how Shannon and his team are using the Netography Fusion platform and the operational, technology, and business benefits they are experiencing.
Shannon set the stage by explaining that FICO operates in a highly regulated environment, so compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) and other frameworks and regulations is essential. Combining network detection and strong segmentation policies for validation and visibility had served them well in their on-premises environment. But as the company began to move to multi-cloud, gaining visibility and control to secure their Atomized Network and remain compliant became far more complicated. That’s when they turned to Netography to help.
Below are some of the highlights of the three ways FICO is scoring big with the Fusion platform. For additional details on their selection, implementation, and use of the platform, as well as a demo, watch the replay.
- Operational: To achieve their network and cloud security objectives, FICO needed to quickly deploy a system that was able to provide them with instant visibility across their hybrid environment consisting of multi-cloud and on-premises infrastructure and devices. Because Fusion is SaaS-based, there was no hardware, no software, nothing to install. FICO was able to get up and running in a matter of minutes. Describing the Fusion platform as “an operational go-to mechanism for a lot of people”, Shannon explains how centralized visibility and visualization through an intuitive dashboard helps the security team and product teams save time and effort so they can get things done quickly. Instead of the old way of running reports nightly, they can see in real-time what’s happening across their Atomized Network. The Netography query language (NQL) is similar to languages they already use with other products, so the learning curve was minimal. In less than 30 minutes new users can be off and running, drilling down into details to detect threats and network issues.
- Technology: Appliance-based models that rely on deep packet inspection (DPI) weren’t going to work in FICO’s hybrid environment from a cost, manageability, and compliance perspective, particularly at scale. As Shannon explained, deploying and maintaining hardware is expensive and encryption requires decrypting traffic which then has to be stored securely until it is re-encrypted. What’s more, they realized flow data provides answers to questions like: “Who is talking to whom? Over what port? Is it being blocked or not? Where is that data going?”. This is all the team really needs to quickly understand what is happening in the network and address issues. FICO takes advantage of the out-of-the-box detection models Netography provides, and also builds their own threat models which include unique geo information, custom IP reputation data, and other indicators related to specific threats and vulnerabilities relevant to them. Netography’s robust set of APIs make it easy to integrate this data into the Fusion platform, automate alerting and detection, and set response policies.
- Business: Shannon discussed their return on investment (ROI), including several examples of how they have reduced time to mitigate or resolve, saved costs, and enhanced their customers’ experience with the Fusion platform. From a security perspective, they have proactively detected threats from red teaming and pen testing exercises, setup threat detection models, and applied those models across their hybrid environment with a few clicks. On the networking side, Fusion has enabled them to quickly understand and address costly data transfer spikes in a matter of seconds, and also detect and resolve network and device connectivity issues as FICO reconfigures offices for a new hybrid work model. Fusion assists with compliance as well, enabling teams to answer auditors’ questions within minutes, for example proving segmentation of the development and production environments. FICO even provides mechanisms to their customers to create “auditor confidence”.
Watch the replay now for more details on how Netography Fusion is helping FICO secure their Atomized Network.