Illumio Provides Unparalleled Visibility in 3 Hours for Mondi Group

Overview and challenges

Mondi Group is a global leader in packaging and paper solutions, employing 26,000 people at 100 production sites across more than 30 countries.

With a commitment to being sustainable by design, innovation is an important component of Mondi’s business model — and their IT strategy follows suit. Mondi relies on a leading data centre outsourcer, responsible for the processes of various business applications. Depending on demand, capacities in the cloud are called up in a virtual data centre.

Their worldwide distributed locations are connected to central resources via a software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) — enabling greater efficiency but placing new demands on security and a need for more granular control.

“We worked for two years with the operator of our data centre on optimizing network security,” recalled Thomas Vavra, Manager Communication Network at Mondi. “But with little hope for success with conventional solutions.”

The team determined microsegmentation was necessary to counter the risk of uncontrolled intrusion into mission-critical applications. But the solution had to match their existing design criteria for performance, flexibility, and simplicity.

How Illumio helped

Mondi found a strong partner in Illumio Core.

“We strive to be one step ahead, and we definitely want to initiate innovations. Illumio is a major technological advancement that is quite unique in the marketplace,” said Vavra.

By harnessing the power of Illumio’s host-based approach that decouples segmentation from the network, Mondi’s global rollout progressed quickly. Illumio Core’s real-time application dependency map provided immediate value. The team gained comprehensive visibility of East-West traffic and connectivity between workloads.

As Vavra explained, “It took us only three hours to perform an initial analysis of our network traffic, which is extremely efficient. We previously spent years trying to obtain this information and process it in such a way that it is useful to us, without success.”

With the map as their baseline for application behavior across the entire network, they “found things that were really difficult to explain.”

But just as easily as they can detect abnormal behavior or policy violations, they can click on the map to restrict or authorize access.

“Given the mathematical complexity of the interdependencies in a highly fragmented network, Illumio provides unparalleled and practical traffic transparency,” said Vavra. “This allows us to manage all traffic and to discover misconfigurations and malicious activity rapidly.”

The speed and simplicity with which Mondi can now protect critical applications would have been virtually impossible with manual, traditional network segmentation methods.

“In comparison with a conventional firewall system, the cost-benefit analysis demonstrates the enormous advantage of Illumio’s solution,” he added.

With Illumio Core, Mondi gets innovation and security that they can sustain and call a success.

In comparison with a conventional firewall system, the cost-benefit analysis demonstrates the enormous advantage of Illumio’s solution. Thomas Vavra Manager Communication Network Mondi Group

Results and benefits

• Unparalleled real-time visibility
  Using Illumio’s live application dependency map, Mondi can quickly visualize and understand application communications across their globally distributed infrastructure.
• Segmentation at the speed of business
  Three hours vs. three years: Illumio Core’s innovative design enabled the team to garner the actionable insights for segmentation that they were after for years — on day one of deployment.