Overland Footwear Reduces Vulnerability Risks With Illumio

Business goals

Founded in 1948, family-owned and operated retailer Overland Footwear prides itself on delivering top quality, craftmanship, and design. In recent years, this has led them to focus on sustainability and safety efforts that benefit both the planet and their customers.

As part of building a more sustainable business model, Overland swapped their traditional printed signage for digital signage, allowing them to save trees while centralizing pricing management. In the process, they also installed cameras in stores to further improve customer safety and employee training.

However, Overland’s IT team knew these new devices introduced new security risks. They wanted to be confident their systems were secure against potential breaches. That’s when Das Goonatilaka, IT Manager at Overland, reached out to Steve Smith, Regional Executive at managed service provider Advantage, to get help with finding a solution that could reduce Overland’s attack surface and ensure continued operations even during a breach.

Technology challenges

Overland’s security is up against the unique challenges of a retail environment. Anyone can walk up to a point-of-sale system and try to gain access when no one’s looking, a problem that’s amplified when staff share passwords to serve customers quickly. Overland also must consider the frequent changes to store staff where security training needs to be balanced with serving customers.

Goonatilaka recognized that connecting hundreds of third-party devices to the company's traditional flat network increased risk even more. But with a small team and limited budget, re-engineering the network to separate environments wasn’t an option.

“Our IT team is quite lean, so we don't really have the resources internally to manage too many different systems and software,” Goonatilaka explained.

Despite these challenges, Goonatilaka knew it was essential to find a fast, simple solution to help them secure operations and build cyber resilience at their 52 sites across New Zealand and Australia. They already had a trusted relationship with Advantage and sought help from Smith for guidance.

How Illumio helped

Advantage made Overland’s search for the right solution easy when Smith immediately suggested Illumio.

“We recommended Illumio as an affordable, quick-to-deploy solution,” Smith said. We were able to help Overland roll out Zero Trust Segmentation with Illumio very quickly.”

Advantage helped Overland get started with end-to-end visibility into their network. “We didn’t have any visibility into how workstations, endpoints, and servers were communicating,” Goonatilaka explained. When we started to see all the traffic flows in the Illumio Map, it was quite eye-opening.”

Using this insight, Overland’s team decided on which traffic needed to be blocked or allowed. Advantage helped them quickly deploy Illumio, and it was up and running in Overland’s network within just a few weeks. Illumio made the new endpoint devices effectively invisible to the rest of the network, ensuring that a breach couldn’t spread to other critical assets. After testing their new policies for a month, Overland went live and has experienced no issues.

According to Goonatilaka, implementing Illumio has been a “no-brainer” for Overland: “Segmentation closes our security gaps. We no longer worry about a potential breach.”

Goonatilaka credits Advantage’s help and Illumio’s ease of use with making the implementation possible. “The team at Advantage made it easy to get everything configured, and Illumio made it super seamless,” he said.

“The reduction of risk is one of the biggest benefits that we got from Illumio. We have the peace of mind that all external third-party devices connected to the network are secure because of Illumio.”
– Das Goonatilaka, IT Manager at Overland Footwear

Results and benefits

Overland continues to see benefits from Illumio, including:

• ‍End-to-end visibility: Overland can see exactly how resources are communicating in their network and use this insight to adjust policies as needed.‍
• Secure network and endpoints: Overland has the peace of mind that potential breaches will be contained and isolated at their source, protecting critical assets and operational continuity.‍
• Business enabler: Partnering with Advantage and choosing Illumio meant Overland's small team could juggle competing priorities with ease.