© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

How a global technology organization alleviates network growing pains.

CASE STUDY

Organization snapshot

Company: Interactive Intelligence

Location: Indianapolis, Indiana headquarters with multiple locations in 30+ countries worldwide, including 10 geo-redundant data centers around the world.

Number of users protected: 2,000+

Challenge: Increasing defenses against malicious activity.

Solution: Cisco Umbrella Cisco Advanced Malware Protection for Endpoints Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services

Impact:

• Reduced malware activity by 30 percent

• Reduction in alerts from other security solutions

• Achieved fast global roll-out of a new layer of security

• No new hardware to purchase

“ Umbrella has allowed us to spend less time fighting malware fires and dedicate more resources to supporting the company’s continued growth.”

Leon Ravenna VP Security and Compliance Interactive Intelligence

© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

The challengeNew growth brings new risk

Interactive Intelligence is a global leader of cloud services for customer engagement, communications and collaboration designed to help businesses improve service, increase productivity, and reduce costs. Vice President of Security and Compliance, Leon Ravenna, appreciates that the company’s long-held position as a top provider of on-premises, single-tenant cloud, and cloud microservice solutions depends on a security infrastructure as efficient and effective as Interactive Intelligence’s technology.

When Ravenna joined the company in 2014, the organization’s recent international expansion resulted in a rapidly expanding global network that presented new and challenging threat vectors. It wasn’t cost efficient to backhaul traffic from multiple countries and, in order to meet business needs, many locations required independent iInternet connections that needed to be protected from external sources of malware.

Ravenna’s mission: quickly and consistently increase the security of the global network without additional hardware.

© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

The solutionPain and hardware-free malware solution goes global

Given Interactive’s many locations across the globe, entrusting network security to bulky on-site appliances requiring ongoing management and maintenance was not an option.

“We didn’t want to add another layer of hardware at each site: this was an absolute requirement. When you’re rolling out hardware in remote locations around the world, you can’t just replace something quickly if it breaks,” said Ravenna. “We needed an external solution that would give us the ability to effectively move this out beyond our borders and stop bad traffic before it hit us.”

Having witnessed Cisco Umbrella’s powerful threat protection in action at a previous organization, Ravenna chose Umbrella because it met his key criteria, including:

• Consistent and proactive prevention of malware before it can enter the network environment

• 100% cloud-delivered and hardware-free

• Rapid deployment regardless of the number of users per location

• Integrations with other components in the security stack

Interactive Intelligence was able to deploy Umbrella to all 30 locations within a few short weeks. “Multiple sites within a region were concurrently provisioned in less than a couple of hours overnight, starting with LATAM before rolling out to Europe, Japan, Canada and finally the U.S. It was a surprisingly painless process,” said Ravenna.

Interactive Intelligence replaced its existing IDS solutions with Cisco ASAs with FirePOWER Services next generation firewalls (NGFW), in combination with Umbrella, and configured them to make use of full functionality including blocking mode in relatively short-order. “The transition was very graceful; in fact, very few people even knew there was a change,” notes Ravenna. “We saw no decrease in performance, and no negative impact to performance means no complaints.”

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The impact

Blocking threats before they reach the perimeter and endpoints

“We have seen at least a 30% decrease in malware activity, with some 200 to 300 external events per hour blocked,” reported Ravenna.

“These results are due to the combined impact of having in place both Umbrella, which stops threats before they reach our network while reducing threat alerts from elsewhere in the security stack, and Cisco ASAs with FirePOWER Services, which blocks additional bad activity and residual malware. Finally, utilizing Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) in combination with existing anti-virus products to protect us on the inside.”

Ravenna explained, “What I’m trying to do is block attack vectors, so the first piece of defense is having Umbrella sitting in front of the network, preemptively taking out threats, then the ASA with FirePOWER Services takes out anything that makes it through or lets through traffic deemed legitimate, and finally anything beyond that is addressed by Cisco AMP.”

Ravenna also liked the ongoing benefits, “The ability to integrate future Cisco cloud security products into our Umbrella platform will continue to benefit us by providing operational and cost efficiencies.”

Umbrella is definitely delivering. “The biggest single contributor to stopping inbound malware is Umbrella, because it blocks the threat before it reaches the network,” said Ravenna “I don’t worry about it, because it is very reliable. Umbrella just does what it’s supposed to do: add an extra layer of security and an extra layer of comfort.”

What’s more, “Every threat caught reduces workload, so we spend less time tracking threats down,” said Ravenna. “OpenDNS Umbrella has allowed us to spend less time fighting malware fires and dedicate more resources to supporting the company’s continued growth.”