NCR accelerates towards Zero-Trust

Scott Theriault,

Global Manager Network Perimeter Security

NCR Corporation

Background

NCR Corporation is a leading global point-of-sale (POS) provider for restaurants, retailers, and banks and a provider of multi-vendor ATM software. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, NCR has over 36,000 employees in 160 countries, and solutions are distributed in 141 countries. As NCR expands into public cloud platforms such as AWS, they require consistent visibility and security policy management across both on-premises and cloud environments.

The challenge

NCR needed to connect its DevOps pipeline with its network security. With over 4,500 policy changes made annually, it was difficult to securely manage their entire networking and security environment while being responsive to application owners but still achieve zero trust.

Strategically, they were aiming to automate and orchestrate security policy changes across their entire hybrid network, so they could securely accelerate application delivery. As applications and services moved into AWS, NCR also needed unified governance across physical firewalls, Cisco ACI, and cloud-native controls such as AWS Security Groups and AWS Network Firewall.

The solution

They implemented the AlgoSec Security Policy Management Solution, made up of AlgoSec Horizon Security Analyzer, AlgoSec Horizon FireFlow, and AlgoSec Horizon AppViz and AppChange. This solution is now part of AlgoSec Horizon, which also includes AlgoSec Cloud Enterprise (ACE) for cloud-native visibility and policy management. AlgoSec Horizon Security Analyzer enables organizations to discover, identify, and map business applications across their entire hybrid network. It analyzes complex network security policies across the network. It automates and simplifies security operations, including troubleshooting, auditing, and risk analysis.

AlgoSec Horizon FireFlow enables security staff to automate the entire security policy change process from design and submission to proactive risk analysis, implementation, validation, and auditing. Its intelligent, automated workflows save time and improve security by eliminating manual errors and reducing risk. AlgoSec Horizon AppViz, the application visibility add-on for AlgoSec Horizon Security Analyzer, provides visibility for your network applications, enabling secure application delivery. AlgoSec AppChange, the application automation add-on for AlgoSec Horizon FireFlow, allows for changes at the business application level, including during the application migrations, server deployment, and decommissioning projects. With ACE, NCR also gains visibility into AWS environments, including VPCs, Transit Gateways, Security Groups, and AWS Network Firewall, ensuring consistent zero-trust controls across their hybrid network.

The results

AlgoSec is a strategic component of NCR’s network security, managing its entire network security infrastructure. The AlgoSec platform enables the NCR Corporation to manage application connectivity end-to-end across their network — including public cloud, Cisco ACI, and physical firewalls. With AlgoSec Horizon and ACE, NCR now extends this visibility into AWS cloud environments, unifying security policy management across firewalls, Cisco ACI, and AWS-native controls such as Security Groups and AWS Network Firewall. “Most products don’t understand the end-to-end environment. AlgoSec does,” noted Scott Theriault, Global Manager, Network Perimeter Security. Some of the ways that NCR Corporation benefits from AlgoSec include:

• Launched migration of their on-premises data centers into the Cisco ACI fabric.
• Extended micro-segmentation to Cisco ACI environment.
• Extended segmentation and zero-trust policy enforcement into AWS cloud architectures.
• Achieved complete visibility of their global security posture from a single dashboard.
• Automated risk analysis, achieving visibility and insights into the risk that changes introduce.
• Streamlined auditing process with to automatic logging and audit-ready compliance reports.
• Cleaned up and reduced firewall policies with rule cleanup, object cleanup, and policy tuning.
• Unified governance across on-prem, ACI, and AWS environments to support consistent zero-trust policy controls.

“As we aspire to achieve zero-trust, when moving into the cloud, micro-segmentation and container security come into play. Therefore, we need tools like AlgoSec to assist us in the journey because most application owners don’t know what access is needed. This tool helps them learn what needs to be implemented to reduce the attack surface,” stated Theriault.