Security risks, compliance issues, and overlapping tools breed vulnerability.
The COVID-19 pandemic increased remote work at Midas Safety by as much as 70%. As more employees tried logging in through different networks, the company’s existing VPN solution faced wireless signal loopholes.
Nishantha Wickramaratne, Head of Cloud Platforms and Information Security, explains, “When we analyzed security and privacy issues due to the increased load on our VPN, we realized there was a massive vacuum to be filled.”
There was also a growing need for cloud compliance and adherence to local data protection laws. Endpoint protection and monitoring were in silos, making it difficult to correlate and track each incident. Additionally, with operations in multiple countries, the Midas Safety IT security team had to manage different tools and different vendors, often dealing with an overlap in technologies and capabilities. Wickramaratne recounts how Midas Safety managed nearly 15–17 firewalls across the group and multiple ISP vendors, and as a result, the company needed to simplify processes for greater efficiency and security.
The company’s IT team found it time-consuming to manage multiple technologies and capabilities. They wanted to consolidate them to achieve single pane-of-glass visibility, better user experience, and enhanced application performance.
“We conducted a gap analysis of our VPN security and visibility, cloud compliance, and tool sprawl and decided that it was time to embark on our consolidation journey, with a focus on zero trust.”
- Nishantha Wickramaratne
Head of Cloud Platforms and Information Security,
Midas Safety
Path to Platformization
Network security
VM-Series with Panorama interface
Secure remote access and connectivity
Prisma SASE, Prisma SD-WAN, and ADEM
Modernize the SOC
Cortex XDR
Consolidation helps simplify and synergize for better user experience and application performance.
Midas Safety did not want to approach the task in a piecemeal fashion. They wanted a solution that would help them:
- Consolidate multiple and overlapping technologies for better alignment and security, and to reduce inefficiencies and cost.
- Ensure zero trust, and promote least-privileged access with continuous trust verification to protect all users, networks, and environments.
- Provide flexibility to customers without putting limitations on their operations.
- Improve management of tools and threats while reducing the time to detect and respond to incidents.
Prior to Palo Alto Networks, Midas Safety had isolated, siloed tools that lead to overlaps and duplication of work. When the company detected any potential anomalous incident, it did not have enough insight to identify the root cause or to know how to respond.
Envisioning a long-term roadmap that would ensure Midas Safety’s protection, Wickramaratne opted for a consolidated solution from Palo Alto Networks. The solution comprises VM-Series NGFWs, Panorama centralized management, Prisma SASE, and Cortex XDR. Prisma SASE has given Midas Safety a combination of Security Service Edge (SSE) capabilities through Prisma Access and SD-WAN on Instant-On Network (ION) devices, as well as Prisma SD-WAN to further optimize the performance and efficiency of its WAN infrastructure.
The company also chose mobile user Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) for a unified view across its environment, including its remote sites and branch locations. Midas Safety now also has a long-term partnership that provides more than band-aid fixes and helps the company future-proof its cybersecurity.
“With the consolidated solution from Palo Alto Networks, we are better armed with tools like VM-Flex, Cortex XDR, and Prisma SASE. We can mesh connections with ease to detect and respond to any potential incident. The team can cross-check and compare for contextual information in a more productive manner, and our response time has also significantly reduced.”
- Nishantha Wickramaratne
Head of Cloud Platforms and Information Security,
Midas Safety
Reduced tool sprawl, ease of integration, and cost reduction
Before deploying Palo Alto Networks, the company had legacy firewalls from at least four vendors. Midas Safety was using an endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution from another vendor and was evaluating four other vendors to address their SASE needs. It ultimately decided on consolidating with Palo Alto Networks. Now, with a unified security approach, the company has reduced the number of overlapping tools and vendors by 80%.
Prisma SD-WAN makes it possible for Midas Safety to enable efficiently secure access for branches, manage policy, and easily create licenses. Switching to Prisma SD-WAN has resulted in greater integration and overall cost reduction as Midas Safety no longer has to manage multiple firewalls from various vendors across its numerous locations.
Improved response times and increase in productivity
With the overall reduction in tool sprawl, the IT security team no longer must shuttle between different technologies and vendors to investigate alerts or incidents. Earlier, logs and alerts were in silos and monitoring them was cumbersome.
ADEM provides complete visibility, contextual troubleshooting, seamless integration, and automatic detection and correlation of incidents. The team can now efficiently troubleshoot, improve response times, and provide a consistent user experience, regardless of site or user location. With Prisma SASE, Midas Safety can ensure compliance in the cloud and with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
This integration solution also supports Midas Safety’s business growth, as it continues to add manufacturing sites in different geographies. The increased flexibility of the solution comes in handy for site blocking and setting limitations.
Decreased mean time to resolution and vulnerability count
With Cortex XDR, Midas Safety now has a centralized, single pane-of-glass visibility and reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR). Cortex XDR automatically integrates security data and correlates data points automatically on one consolidated interface. As a result, Midas Security has gained a comprehensive view of potential security events, with greater detection, faster investigation times, and reduced resources. This has resulted in improved efficiency and speed of resolution from 48 hours to 15 minutes, for a 99.5% reduction in MTTR.
The patch deployment process has also improved significantly. With the deep visibility Cortex XDR provides, the Midas team can streamline the patch update process and drastically bring down the total vulnerability count. Overall this has greatly improved the threat detection and resolution capabilities of Midas Safety, considering the security team no longer has to manually sift through logs and data sources to correlate incidents or experience alert fatigue.
Figure 1. Vulnerability footprint summary graph: June 2023 to December 2024
Resilient network, simplified management, robust security
Midas Safety needed tools that could simplify connectivity and protect the organization from vulnerabilities across multiple geographies and found a comprehensive feature set of best-in-class solutions from Palo Alto Networks. Midas Safety is now looking at the Next-Generation Cloud Access Security Broker (NG-CASB) solution from Palo Alto Networks.
Discover how Palo Alto Networks best-in-class solutions can improve networking and security for your organization. Learn more about VM-Series Next-Generation Firewalls, Prisma SASE, and Cortex XDR.
“It has been a long journey with the team, and it has been one that has been collaborative and rewarding. Our feedback is constantly utilized to improve the product and user experience.”
- Zeeshan Muhammad
Head of Infrastructure and Network Security,
Midas Safety
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