How Mars affected a sea change in its cloud security
Mars is a multinational consumer goods company known for their confectionary. Over the past several years, they have moved to the cloud and have developed new expertise and ways of working to support that. They primarily use Azure to centralize their user-driven services and innovate their digital offerings. As their cloud usage continues to expand, the security organization strives to build a collaborative relationship with developer and DevOps teams at Mars to ensure that their cloud security posture can keep pace with their speed of innovation.
With many teams deploying to the cloud and introducing new technologies, the security team was faced with a responsibility to map and understand what was in the cloud as they shifted from a model where deployments were managed by core IT to one owned by a wide range of development teams. Their main priorities were to get visibility into everything in their cloud environment, both core and secondary assets, and to develop strong, trusted relationships with DevOps to ensure that they were able to remediate any issues that arose as efficiently as possible.
They set out to find a cloud-native infrastructure security solution that could deliver visibility into the entire span of their cloud environment and deep context into risks that would help the security team work more effectively and quickly with DevOps to prioritize and remediate issues. After a thorough examination of the market, they found Wiz.
Wiz unifies several cloud security technologies, including CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, and vulnerability management and weaves together the interconnected risk factors across multiple layers to identify the highest priority issues. Wiz’s Security Graph lets Mars visualize their cloud environment and see how everything interacts and connects. The visibility into assets across the cloud, from PaaS to containers to VM images, and the ability to map the relationships between them brought value to both security and operations teams, and the full context around risks presented in an intuitive manner helped Mars build trust in the importance of the issues that Wiz flagged across security, developer, and operations teams.
Over 8-12 months with Wiz, Mars was able to affect a sea change in their security posture. They got a full asset inventory of their cloud environment for the first time and were able to make measurable improvements to their security posture across the board. They started with external access and exposure, expanded to configuration and compliance, and, more recently, began shifting security left through image scanning in the pipeline.
The security team was able to build trust with developers and operations through Wiz. With rich data into their cloud and its risks, Mars was able to push for new standards and guide rails around security, helping to mature the organization. The integrations that Wiz brought out-of-the-box allowed DevOps teams to plug Wiz into their workflows, so they could move faster and see any issues that arose directly rather than as reports from security.
Mars has found an engaged cloud security partner in Wiz that they can collaborate with to keep up with the speed of change and complexity in the cloud. With Wiz in place, Mars has made the cloud the best understood part of their environment, so they can enable their developer and DevOps teams to innovate and move quickly.