Established in 1948, the Detmold Group is an Australian family-owned and operated business, supplying some of the world’s largest and most iconic food and retail brands including McDonalds, Hungry Jacks, Subway, Coles, Woolworths and Jurlique.
In light of changing dynamics and threats in the IT security landscape, Detmold decided to adopt a managed security service offering to rapidly uplift the entire security posture across the organisation.
This was all part of a larger IT modernisation and transformational push, as Detmold wanted to ensure the entire network was part of the global solution, and not operating in individual siloes.
An increase in remote working meant the existing security framework and Detmold’s IT team of 11 couldn’t safely support the associated risks.
“When COVID hit the world, we had to facilitate more remote working and more collaboration utilities. The security tools in place at the time, and our security environment, didn’t support us in the way that would make us feel comfortable,” said Mark Render, GM – Technology at Detmold Group, admitting he had more risk than ever before to contend with.
“You’re allowing people to use their own home devices, more BYOD, more people dialling in over VPN – you name it. You have people connecting into your network from uncontrolled environments – all of this brings with it a heightened level of risk and concern.”
With security threats and attacks on the rise, Detmold wanted to take proper steps and procedures to mitigate the risks and help secure company-wide operations.
“We were forced to consider what our security footprint actually looked like and whether it was supportive of modern standards, approaches and techniques. And it genuinely wasn’t.”
As a small team, there was a concern that if something malicious got into the environment, they may not be able to react quickly enough to prevent it from causing real harm.
“Having the service outsourced means it’s now the responsibility of a specialised security organisation that’s geared up and set up to run this 24/7, and 365 days a year. That alone is worth its weight in gold.”
After a thorough review of the requirements, Atturra began to guide Detmold through their modernisation journey.
“They helped put together the business case, the ROI proposals and helped with vendor negotiations to ensure we were paying the best price for the unique solution we needed,” said Mark.
To ensure Detmold’s security posture was supportive of modern standards, Atturra suggested they align themselves to a modernised security framework, the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Essential 8. This framework contains eight pillars to achieving the securities standards.
The Atturra solution included Sophos endpoint and server protection, as well as Sophos Managed Threat Response (MTR) technology which helped Detmold achieve four of these pillars and contribute to the uplift of three more.
The managed security offering not only provides threat hunting, detection and response service (even fusing machine learning with human analysis for an evolved approach to proactive security protection), but also plays a critical role in protecting Detmold’s entire IT infrastructure.
Detmold is now able to see better, have more control and visibility across their environment, and have added peace of mind with things like application white listing.
The IT team can also crank up its testing performance, deploy security patches more rapidly, enhance its user support, and ‘know each and every nuance’ of the user’s experience, according to Mark.
With Sophos MTR onboard, Mark said the company has clinched a few of the Essential 8 pillars including application control, application patching, application hardening, office macro control as well as enhancing end point and web security.
What’s more, Sophos MTR is offering much needed peace of mind as it combines malicious traffic detection with real-time threat intelligence in a bid to prevent, detect and remediate threats easily and efficiently.
Mark explains that this project has garnered a lot of attention internally and has given the IT team confidence to deliver on other large-scale projects which will support the company’s growth agenda.
