Leading European Automobile Trading Enterprise Increases Security, Ensures Compliance, Optimizes Firewall Operations and Streamlines Productivity
• Increase IT productivity without adding headcount
• Reduce time and resources required to implement firewall policy changes
• Improve IT Governance and accountability over the network security policy
• Improve security posture and gain visibility into the impact of proposed changes
Porsche Informatik GmbH, a subsidiary of Porsche Holding, is one of the biggest private trading enterprises in Austria and the most successful automobile trade companies in Europe. The Company provides integrated software solutions for the automobile sector serving importers, retailers and financial service providers in over 21 countries. With its multi-vendor, multi-firewall infrastructure consisting of various Check Point clusters and firewalls, Porsche Informatik has been supporting some of the most successful automobile brands in the world including Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, Seat and Skoda.
As an enterprise serving the leading automobile brands, Porsche Informatik is committed to ensuring the integrity of its network and maintaining compliance with corporate security policies. Optimizing its operations is another top priority. With a large number of firewalls undergoing continuous rule changes, Porsche Informatik’s team had to manually confirm that all of the changes were correctly configured and adhered to corporate policy. To do this, Porsche Informatik needed to keep track of changes: when they were made, who made them and verify that they weren’t introducing clutter and subsequent risk into their environment. “As the rule base continued to grow, it became increasingly complex and harder to keep track of the details,” says Anton Spitzer, Infrastructure Services Manager at Porsche Informatik. “Monitoring and auditing of our firewalls and clusters has become a painstaking manual, time and labor intensive process and we needed to handle it more effectively.” Porsche Informatik looked for a solution that would allow them to automatically and comprehensively manage the entire change lifecycle of their heterogeneous firewall infrastructure to improve and optimize operations, bolster security and comply with the corporate security policy in an easier way.
Porsche Informatik selected the AlgoSec Security Management solution to provide automated, comprehensive firewall operations and security risk management.
In particular, Porsche Informatik liked AlgoSec’s auditing capability as it tracks changes in real-time as well as provides analysis of the operational and security implications of those changes.
With AlgoSec, Porsche Informatik can now intelligently automate manual, labor and time intensive tasks, optimize firewall operations and improve network security while enforcing corporate policies to provide improved IT Governance.
“AlgoSec allows our team to quickly and easily understand the operational and security impact of rule changes on our corporate policy, while at the same time provides a detailed audit trail, which is crucial for us to maintain compliance,” says Spitzer.
From an operations and risk perspective, AlgoSec enables Porsche Informatik to instantly know which rules and objects are obsolete, invalid and duplicate and where potential security holes exist. The ability to clean up the firewall policy has streamlined network operations and given Porsche Informatik better visibility into their firewall infrastructure. “We cleaned up our existing policy base and now utilize the “what if” analysis to prevent the introduction of clutter and risk into our environment,” explains Spitzer.
Ultimately, with AlgoSec, Porsche Informatik can now easily determine the necessity of changes and their potential security implications which saves time and effort.
As a result productivity has increased without adding headcount. “After several months of use, AlgoSec has made a quantifiable impact on our firewall operations and security risk management. We know exactly what changes are being made, by whom and the implications of those changes on our operations and security posture,” said Spitzer. “We now spend much less time analyzing and auditing our firewalls, allowing our IT personnel to work on additional projects. As a customer-centric company, optimized internal operations directly benefits our clients by allowing Porsche Informatik to focus wholly on their needs instead of on firewall management.”
