This company, based in the North of England is a B2C seller of branded clothes via the internet. The company has never had a physical shop-front, relying exclusively on the internet to handle its business.
The average daily turnover is in excess of £500k so the Company is highly sensitive to a loss of operations and its cyber infrastructure. The value of the company is in its trading so the Executive is clear in ensuring that this should grow unaffected.
Production of the goods is outsourced with no-house manufacturing capability.
Challenges and Opportunities
Challenges
The company has two major challenges with its infrastructure; to ensure ongoing business operations and to protect client data. The Company is aware of similar enterprises that have been compromised (both by cyber attacks and outages) and are seeking to avoid this. The market is highly competitive and the brand cannot afford to be tainted, impacting client confidence. Furthermore there is continual pressure from their insurers to demonstrate a top-down approach to reducing business loss.
The company maintains its own IT operations but has outsourced some sub-functions. As the business had grown rapidly and organically the dependencies were only partially documented.
The business is also aware of competitors that had experienced low and slow attacks aimed at compromising their business.
Opportunities
The opportunity here was to use Precision Genie to strengthen the business and minimise any loss of operations, partial or otherwise. This can be achieved by identifying weaknesses, improving resilience, but also by predicting and remedying issues before they occur.
Director support was crucial as it allowed the infrastructure team to improve resilience when the business case was clear.
Improved response and accurate intelligence intelligence provided by Precision Genie would be able to reduce the business impact.
A further opportunity was to understand where data was held and to tighten the performance and control of outsourced systems. It was identified that whilst the systems were outsourced, in practical terms the risk was not. Use of the latest threat intelligence was identified as an opportunity to ensure that unknown business risks were minimised.
The Solution
Infinite Precision undertook analysis of the business to clarify the key processes and data flows. For this site, other real-time infrastructure monitoring was included (including external communications and third party services).
Precision Genie was installed on-site. Reports are used by both the Executive and the IT infrastructure Team. Real-time alarming is set-up that notifies if the business value is under threat and if this is due to system failure or a structured attack.
Why Precision Genie
- Identification in real-time of any threat to the business and the business value.
- It allows clarity as to which systems handle key-data.
- Precision Genie offers real-time threat-based intelligence regarding the actual and potential threats to the business.
- The CFO now has visibility of any issues or threats that could affect the
- The analysis identified where data was actually being stored and allowed the systems that held or transferred this data to be upgraded, removing multiple threat vectors.
Business Benefits from Precision Genie
- At installation, multiple issues were identified with the existing system infrastructure which allowed the infrastructure team an opportunity to focus on rectifying actual issues. The infrastructure team workload is significant
- The CFO now has visual oversight of any impact on operations that could affect the business value, either due to a potential data breach or a loss of operations.
- IT support now have real-time 24/7 alarming, essential to a 24/7 business.