Advertogs

(Note:  In this brave new world of making up words rather than learning the words we have, I thought I would introduce one of my own:  advertog, which I define as a company advertisement disguised as a blog entry.  An example of such an animal is below.)

Case Study - Vandelay Industries

Vandelay Industries, an industry-leading manufacturer of best of breed latex products, implemented Network Access Control (NAC) from Mirage Networks to ensure endpoint compliance across its enterprise network and protect its networks from day-zero malware.

Vandelay Industries has direct operations in 43 countries, across 6 continents.  Its state-of-the-art latex manufacturing facilities, located in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Memphis, TN and Taipei, Taiwan make heavy use of embedded OS devices to run the manufacturing line.  Vandelay Industries is also a IP Telephony customer, leveraging IP based phones in all of its locations.  Finally, Vandelay employs a direct latex sales staff of over 500 people, and provides hoteling facilities at all of its major branch locations around the world.

"We evaluated a broad range of NAC solutions available in the market place," said Kel Vansen, Vandelay's Chief Security Officer.  "The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) based NAC solutions we tried, not that there's anything wrong with the protocol, disconnected our IP phones.  Similarly, inline enforcement contained too many latency and availability risks, and the large number of embedded OS devices in our environment precluded any kind of wide-scale agent-based solution.  Mirage's virtually inline approach was the perfect fit."  "It's the best, Jerry!  The best!" added Keny Bania, Director of IT Security.

With a large online catalog of latex products available for direct sale, Vandelay Industries also had a strategic PCI compliance initiative.  Yet simply finding and tracking the servers responsible for financial transactions was proving problematic for Vandelay's on-demand business model.  "By the time we could compile the list of financial servers, the list was stale.  Latex is big business," said Kosmo Kramer, Global Compliance Director.  "Mirage allowed us to govern the use of service ports across all endpoints on the network and implement the spirit as well as the letter of PCI.  Mirage made us masters of our domain.  Giddyup!"

Manageability and reporting were also key concerns.  In an effort to cut costs and improve efficiency, Vandelay merged the Network Operations and Security Operations Center staff across the 4 dedicated centers worldwide.  "With our reduced staff, we needed some shrinkage in the number of deployed management tools," noted Vansen.  "Mirage's ability to integrate with existing security and network event management tools was a key factor in our decision."  The global compliance group also leverages Mirage's report infrastructure to deliver timely reports to compliance auditors, greatly increasing the productivity of the compliance team.  "Prior to implementing Mirage's solution, compliance audits made us all want to quone." said Mr. Kramer.  "We have serenity, now."

Happy April 1, everyone.  Remember to have some fun out there..