Grizzly – Information Security Solutions

About Grizzly

Grizzly’s mission is to make security accessible and achievable for all businesses no matter the size. The company helps companies focus on their product instead of securing their environment.

About the Client: A high end virtual meeting and events company hired William Worthington, CEO and Cofounder of Grizzly to act as their acting outsourced CISO to help them with security and compliance.  The client company manages global events and has a remote workforce that includes third party contractors to support seasonality. The nature of their business also requires them to meet strict security and compliance requirements to ensure client data is protected. 

The Challenge

Keeping up with a fast moving industry

The client needed help to meet SOC2 and fulfill their obligation to clients, many of which are large financial organizations, who have strict levels of compliance to deliver secure events. All client data needs to be protected. Because of the nature of their business they have a lot of seasonality and so they often have many global third party remote contractors based to help support that. Working with third parties opens the door to security risk and endpoint security is top of the list from a vulnerability perspective.

With a large seasonal workforce, the flux in remote contractors can swing dramatically from month to month and reach into the thousands. Because of this, managed desktops don’t make sense and with VDI provisioning was a nightmare. The company was in the process of rolling out VDI but with provisioning issues and the high expense and overhead, it was a problem for their business. Not to mention latency issues that could impact the quality of their events. They needed a secure remote work solution that the delivery team would be very confident in rolling out and would work with the tools they need to use including one drive, office 365, slack, outlook, zoom, webex, and SaaS apps.

The Solution

Enable Secure BYO-PC for both employees third party contractors

Grizzly worked with the client to install and rollout Venn’s Secure Enclave to enable global secure remote work on both employee and third party personal BYO PC and Mac laptops. This eliminates the need for shipping out and retrieving locked down and managed laptops.

“Installing the Secure Enclave app is easy. You just follow the prompts, and Boom! I installed it myself and it was very straightforward and works with all of the applications users need. Its very intuitive,” Worthington states. “Any company that has third party management that requires them to log into secure environments, Venn is like a ‘chef-kiss.’ It’s a great solution for any company with contractors in the medical field, doctors offices, financial services with a regulatory requirement or wants to reduce the cost of PC management.”

Onboard and Offboard in Minutes

With a big flux in contractors supporting events, it was necessary to onboard and offboard quickly. To make it easier to provision users into Venn, the solution integrated with their Azure IDP for automatic provisioning. Now the delivery team is able to create workflows without complexity and productivity loss. They can bring on new customers quickly and users can be onboarded and offboarded in minutes.

Improved compliance for security and privacy protection

With Venn’s turnkey compliance, the team was easily able to configure the solution to meet even the most stringent security requirements that their clients were asking for including SOC2, SEC, HIPAA, PCI and more. The team is now able to easily provide evidence to their clients that they can keep their data secure, that endpoints adhere to encryption, proxy control, and more.

“By speeding up the onboarding process by having your ducks in a row related to security, it speeds up contract processes. With all of the checks that Venn does, it ensures that they are managing their environment correctly with minimal overhead. It has really helped the business to get a leg up on meeting client security requirements which helps them more quickly onboard new clients,” stated William Worthington.

A secure workspace for email, data and applications

With the Secure Enclave, users can now have a personal space and a workspace on any personal BYO PC or Mac computers. The client has configured the enclave to provide secure access to one drive, office 365, slack, outlook, zoom, webex, and SaaS apps. All data is isolated and protected within the enclave. They are able to protect all sensitive information by controlling the device, copy/past, screenshare and downloads. They can track appropriate work-related activity without compromising user privacy.

Eliminated Need for Virtual Desktops

The company tested Citrix as a VDI solution to solve the problem but quickly found it was too expensive and required a lot of overhead and a team of engineers to be able to manage it.

“It was just not possible for this organization. Having a third party bring your own device scenario with the security requirements needed for their clients was much easier to address with Venn,” stated Worthington.