OVERVIEW

This leading distributor of high-performance plastics delivers more than 70 years of experience to the sign and graphics, mechanical, and engineering industries. Grown to encompass more than 50 distribution centers across North America, the company overlooks more than 200 endpoints and a mix of on-site, remote, and hybrid employees. This rapid growth, combined with the increasing sophistication of ransomware threats, has led its director of IT operations to partner with Trend Micro to update their security solution.

CHALLENGES

Ensuring IT security across a highly dispersed company is an ongoing challenge. Although the company’s IT teams conducted extensive security training and tests, their director remained concerned with security across their endpoints and the level of internal IT hygiene that could be maintained. This concern was driven home when one of their sister companies was a victim of a ransomware attack. “We wanted to learn from their incident and ensure we weren’t as vulnerable. We used that incident as an opportunity to take our IT security to the next level and build a framework for next-generation security preparedness,” says the director of IT operations.

WHY TREND

“We have been a Trend customer for 20 years. As long as I’ve had an association with Trend, their products just work,” says the director of IT operations.

Partnering with Trend saves the company the time and expense of hiring and training a highly skilled internal IT security team. “Trend’s managed services group gives me 24/7 eyes and ears on my enterprise. The fact that they staff sophisticated, trained engineers who can jump in and react is of huge value to me.”

“Trend also helps ensure that our compant keeps pace with quickly evolving security threats,” says the director. “I need to partner with an organization that I can trust that has the tools not only to protect me today, but also next week, in the next six months, and the next couple of years. Trend’s consistent product innovation demonstrates their ability to do that.”

SOLUTION

As the director worked to take the company’s IT security to the next level, he examined solutions from other security companies but ultimately chose to stay with Trend. “I needed to have centralized visibility and enterprise-level security across endpoints, servers, and email. Trend’s protection and XDR capabilities combined with their platform approach matched my requirements.”

Based on Trend’s recommendations, the company migrated to Trend Vision One™ to benefit from consolidated visibility and analysis. “I don’t want to spend hours figuring out the problem. I want the system to tell me what’s wrong so I can quickly fix it. Trend Vision One enables us to see if our systems are performing normally or not and take remediation actions all in one place. It allows me to focus my attention where it’s needed.”

RESULTS

“Today, Trend Vision One provides us with 360-degree visibility into security across the organization via a central console. The ability to receive alerts and react to security events in real time allows our IT teams to sleep at night,” says the director. “Within a few seconds, we have a clear understanding of whether things are going okay or whether there are things I need to address.”

That came in handy in October 2022 when the company was alerted to a potential network attack. “Within minutes, I knew we had to instigate an incident response team. Trend Vision One gave me immediate clarity of what was happening and the tools to mitigate the attack before it impacted our customers or revenue. Without that, the cost to the business would have been significant.”

“Reduced time spent diagnosing problems also frees my team to focus on activities that support the business rather than on security alone. Trend Vision One increases our ability to support the business more efficiently and at a reduced cost.”

WHAT'S NEXT

In the future, the plastics distributor plans to work with Trend to ensure that they are using Trend’s solutions to their fullest capabilities, to test newer capabilities like Trend Vision One™ Zero Trust Secure Access, and to determine how to make the best use of Trend tools to manage third-party integrations. “We are a Cisco shop, so I’m looking forward to even greater integration with the Cisco architecture. That will take me a step closer to having a fully integrated security platform across multiple partners,” says the director of IT Operations.