Rancho Mission Viejo saves 25 hours weekly on ensuring accountability of its remote workforce and trusted team of consultants

Challenge

• Limited visibility into outsourced IT operations
  The CIO at Rancho Mission Viejo oversees strategic initiatives, planning, and IT budgeting, while daily IT operations are managed by a mix of managed service providers (MSPs) and third-party application vendors. However, with multiple external teams involved, the CIO needed greater visibility to automate change auditing, ensure accountability, and detect any unauthorized or rogue activity within the network.
• Lack of insight into activity around sensitive financial data
  Rancho Mission Viejo manages large volumes of sensitive financial information, including business plans, budgeting data for residential and corporate development, and separate ERP systems for Family Office and Development operations. The CIO required visibility into how this data was being accessed and used to quickly identify suspicious actions and mitigate potential data breaches.

Netwrix solution

John Chow, CIO at Rancho Mission Viejo, chose Netwrix Auditor because it provides flexible reporting and alerting capabilities for its core IT systems. He especially liked that he could fine-tune the alerts to his organization’s needs and security policies. John’s management also valued that Netwrix generates reports on users working after hours and details exactly what they were doing. With the solution, Rancho Mission Viejo gained the following benefits:

• Network activity monitoring of remote users and third-party vendors/consultants. With Netwrix, John can review user activity reports and receive real-time alerts of activity across the IT environment and make sure that activity is authorized. It even alerts him to critical actions, such as changes to group membership, privileges and Active Directory accounts. This functionality was particularly useful when Rancho Mission Viejo was in the process of switching to a new vendor and wanted to make sure that the outgoing vendor was not making any unauthorized changes.
• Visibility into activity around sensitive data. Netwrix solutions give John deep insight into insider threats and spot actions that might affect data security much faster. In particular, he can now detect users working outside business hours and monitor the manipulation of sensitive files and folders, including who is accessing which files and what they are doing with them, so he can take action promptly to prevent security incidents.
• Early detection of malware and brute-force attacks. John uses Netwrix to promptly detect attacks (through real-time alerts), including ransomware and brute-force attacks. The software helps him spot any deviations from his known good baseline, such as excessive failed logins, mass changes to files and folders (both failed and successful), and suspicious file extensions that could be malware, viruses or other dangerous executables stored on public shares. In those cases, he can investigate quickly and thwart the attack before it inflicts any damage.
• Continuous support and communication with the vendor. John appreciates not just the product functionality, but his great experience with Netwrix overall, which includes seamless onboarding, responsive and fast technical support, educational sessions about new features, and webinars on the most pressing cybersecurity threats and emerging compliance standards. This multifaceted support further increases the ROI of Netwrix software for Rancho Mission Viejo.

Key benefits

• Improved accountability of remote users and third-party vendors
• Enforced security of financial data
• Ensured prompt detection of cyberattacks
• Maximized ROI for the security investment