Fortune 500 SaaS Player Finalizes Acquisition With Illumio

Overview and challenge

A Fortune 500 SaaS player needed to finalize a high-profile acquisition expected to be revenue accretive. Executive bonuses were dependent on a quick integration with board-level visibility.

The company had to move acquired systems into their data center to lower operational costs while preventing downtime to current operations on either side. Yet a data center’s worth of applications and flows wasn’t well understood and had to be quarantined under effective policy or risked being a threat to the buyer’s core applications.

Furthermore, the acquiring company did not want to completely expose their existing data center to the technology that they had inherited.

At stake for the acquired teams was a sink-or-swim project as an entrée to navigating a much larger corporate entity many states away — potentially falling behind peers or dooming the transition with early failure.

How Illumio helped

Despite resistance to “another agent,” the team deployed Illumio Core on the acquired company’s 700 servers, gathering data in a few minutes without impacting machines.

The implementation team visualized application dependencies and wrote new draft rules for all segmentation policies in a matter of days, defying expectations. They segmented the acquired data center assets with security policies that were easy to understand and adequately separated from the new infrastructure to allay any concerns about affecting the buyer’s existing assets.

The team completed the migration on time and met project specifications with better-than-expected integration and automation hooks that satisfied DevOps teams. This outcome thrilled the parent company, scoring an early and sizable win for the incoming team.

Results and benefits

• Just-in-time deployment
  The team deployed and implemented Illumio’s plug-and-play solution with superior ease of use for policy administration, preventing unauthorized network movement with a low administrative burden.
• Real-time visibility to design safer security
  The team used a real-time application dependency map to segment the environment and build effective policies, eliminating inflexible constructs like VLANs, zones, overlays, subnets, or IP addresses.
• Tackle vulnerabilities with ease
  Security teams could now view highly exposed workloads and remediate potential lateral pathways leveraging the real-time application dependency map’s ability to display vulnerabilities between and within applications.