Fortune 100 Healthcare Service Manages Critical Divestiture With Illumio

Overview and challenge

A Fortune 100 healthcare service sold a part of their business and associated infrastructure to a foreign entity and both businesses needed to realize the synergies immediately.

However, without an understanding of how the company’s own applications were interconnected, their teams were unsure of what part of their IT infrastructure the new acquirer potentially touched and risked breaking business-critical applications by arbitrarily cutting communications.

When the buyer wanted to integrate its purchase immediately, it risked exposing the inside of the selling company’s data center — creating an untenable risk to security and business continuity.

The company’s attempts to identify application dependencies using the network provided limited visibility, preventing them from confidently segmenting the acquired assets. After all, you can’t segment what you can’t see. With contractual obligations for handover looming, a potential consultant-based solution was costly and excessively lengthy, and the consultants lacked the visibility to get the job done.

How Illumio helped

The company needed a fast, airtight solution to avoid a failed business transaction and stop unauthorized network access. They chose the Illumio Core.

Leveraging the real-time application dependency map, IT teams could quickly understand system communication flows and segment them confidently. This allowed the acquirer exposure to relevant assets within their data center while locking down any systems access outside the scope of the divestiture.

The business could proceed in gaining ROI for its investment, chalking up a win for the divestiture team. The networking team avoided re-architecting — or even touching — the network. Security teams rested easy with the protection of ringfencing their data center assets through segmentation, avoiding a potential high-profile fire drill — or worse yet, a bet-the-business breach.

Results and benefits

• Just-in-time deployment
  The team prevented unauthorized network movement with a low administrative burden through Illumio’s plug-and-play solution, delivering superior ease of use for policy administration.
• Real-time visibility to design safer security
  The team used an intuitive real-time application dependency map to segment the environment and build effective policies, eliminating inflexible constructs like VLANs, zones, overlays, subnets, or IP addresses.
• Tackle vulnerabilities with ease
  Security teams could now view highly exposed workloads and remediate an attacker’s potential lateral pathways through the real-time application dependency map’s ability to display vulnerabilities between and within applications.