Le Point News Media Elevates Its Security Beyond Traditional VLANs

Business goals

Founded in 1972, the news magazine Le Point has established itself as a high-end and influential digital news source and a leading magazine in France. Le Point is also part of a successful business conglomerate owned by François Pinault, owner of the investment holding company Artémis and Kering’s fashion enterprise, whose labels include Gucci and Yves Saint-Laurent.

The Le Point website and app attract more than eight million unique monthly visitors. The magazine, headquartered in Paris, has a circulation of nearly 300,000 people in France and abroad.

With a critical need for robust IT infrastructure to support its news and digital operations, Le Point’s IT Operations Director, Jean-Philippe Gramond, understands how Zero Trust and cyber and operational resilience are necessary to deliver news to audiences worldwide.

Technology challenges

Like many businesses, digital transformation is an essential driver of Le Point's business and IT infrastructure. According to Jean-Philippe Gramond, Le Point needed to redesign its network and improve its security posture beyond traditional Virtual Local Area Networks (VLAN).

Le Point’s infrastructure required a solution that could handle complexity without compromising performance or security.

“We opted for microsegmentation for its granular, infrastructure-independent protection and for its visibility and dynamic control, which reduces risks from cyberattacks,” explained Jean-Philippe Gramond. Microsegmentation has become essential to protect our hard-to-patch business application servers.”

 Le Point needed to secure its servers by restricting access only to authorized users, bolstering its defenses against potential cyber threats such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. “Before using Illumio, there was remote access to the servers outside the network, which created a risk of bad actors potentially exploiting any security flaws,” said Jean-Philippe Gramond. They needed to limit their Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Secure Shell (SSH) access and isolate its critical resources. Thanks to Illumio, they established an administrative stronghold as the single access point.

“This strategy has strengthened our security by centralizing and strictly controlling access, which is vital for the security of our IT infrastructure,” said Jean-Philippe Gramond. We have suffered only one DDoS attack targeting our internet link. Illumio is, therefore, deployed as a preventive measure.”

Since we installed Illumio Core, we were immediately able to get near real-time visibility into all traffic flowing between agent-enabled endpoints. Jean-Philippe Gramond IT Operations Director Le Point

How Illumio helped ‍

Le Point’s relationship with Illumio began when the team encountered difficulty deploying another policy-based network security solution, which was a poor fit for Le Point’s two-cluster infrastructure. The complexity of implementing in an environment of two active-active clusters was a major challenge. The efforts with their vendor lasted more than a year and proved unsuccessful. “We were forced to use resource synchronization scripts, an approach that we felt was too precarious and was limited to a perimeter of virtual machines (VM), thus excluding our physical servers,” explained Jean-Philippe Gramond.

Faced with these difficulties, Le Point was presented with two alternatives: Illumio or another Illumio competitor. “Illumio was the most suitable solution,” explained Jean-Philippe Gramond.

Several other criteria also guided the team’s decision to go with Illumio, beginning with the proof-of-concept (POC). “Illumio’s POC process was efficient and fast and convinced us that Illumio was the best fit for our specific needs,” said Jean-Philippe Grandmond.

“Illumio is simple to understand and install. A server was deployed within a week, and the agent was installed without rebooting. The work then began, including traffic analysis, workload configuration, and rule set development. All this was done quickly. In two weeks, we had labels, logs, and feed reports.”

In addition, the deployment speed was paramount for Jean-Philippe Gramond: “Illumio stood out, with a quick implementation and integration into our information system.” Another driving factor was Illumio's ability to operate efficiently in an active-active dual-cluster information system environment.

Finally, Illumio's ease of use has been crucial. “We were looking for a solution that was not only powerful but also intuitive, allowing our teams to quickly master it without requiring extensive training,” Jean-Philippe Gramond said. Illumio is a perfect fit and greatly simplifies the day-to-day administration of our network security.”

“Illumio established itself as a true orchestrator of the firewalls of the various servers, offering a complete and efficient solution that perfectly met our security and infrastructure management needs.”

Results and benefits

Superior microsegmentation deployment over competitors: Le Point achieved immediate visibility, cost savings, and security controls, enabling it to orchestrate firewalls and simplify the day-to-day administration of its network security.

End-to-end visibility: Le Point can see precisely how resources communicate in their network and can use this insight to adjust policies as needed.

Reduced risk and increased cyber resilience: Illumio ensures the complete security of Le Point’s media network.