Customer Story: Greenleaf Hospitality: Threat Detection Case Study

Challenge

Hackers are targeting mid-size businesses that have a wealth of valuable data, but lack the budget to adequately staff a security team.

Solution

Blumira’s modern SIEM platform reviews and retains security logs while providing timely and actionable alerts to the Greenleaf team. They can focus on driving value to their business while Blumira identifies and mitigates IT security risks.

Blumira does the heavy lifting to pare down the overwhelming amount of data from logs into actionable events. That allows us to focus on revenue-enhancing activities.

About Greenleaf

Greenleaf Hospitality Group is a $40 million organization, made of three companies with 550 employees. Within those three companies, Greenleaf operates 18 separate businesses, including:

• A 340-room AAA 4-Diamond Rated Radisson Plaza Hotel, over 44,000 square feet of meeting space, four restaurants, a salon and spa and retail outlets.
• Wings Event Center, a 5000+ seat multi-purpose event venue, home to the Kalamazoo Wings minor league hockey team, and housing three ice rinks.
• Wings West, a family entertainment complex, with two NHL-sized ice arenas, meeting space, a restaurant and sports pro shop.

Business Objectives

As an award-winning hospitality group, Greenleaf strives to maintain strict data security while operating a lean, efficient, and business-focused technology group. Greenleaf’s objectives include:

• Keeping customer data secure
• Complying with the Payment Card Industry (PCI DSS) compliance security requirements
• Monitoring and analyzing data from 20 million daily log entries
• Freeing internal technology resources for revenue-enhancing business functions

CIO Michael Cross is clear about his data security priority:

“We want to ensure that when a customer decides to spend their discretionary dollars with us, they do it without their personal information being compromised.”

Challenges

Greenleaf Hospitality Group processes nearly a million credit card transactions a year across the three properties. That information is very valuable to criminals, who have expanded their efforts in recent years, going after smaller companies viewed as ‘softer targets.’ Greenleaf wants to protect its customers and comply with PCI DSS security standards.

Greenleaf’s next-generation firewalls and other security devices produce around 20 million logs per day. Protecting a network like this is complex. Small and mid-sized organizations, like Greenleaf, don’t have the resources to support having a full-time IT security expertise on staff.

Solution

Blumira reviews and retains security logs while providing timely and actionable alerts to the Greenleaf team.

Why Blumira

Prior to using Blumira’s service, Greenleaf contracted with a large provider using a SIEM tool. But Greenleaf’s IT team was flooded with alerts. Greenleaf determined that Blumira’s security expertise was critical in identifying truly important events and avoiding alert fatigue. Cross credits Blumira with a strong understanding of Greenleaf’s environment, as well as deep expertise in security and managed services.

“When we came on board, we assessed our needs and it became clear that there was a level of skill set that we needed to properly manage and secure our environment that we weren’t able to fill with our internal team,” said Cross. “Good security engineers are very expensive.”

Results

When quantifying Greenleaf’s financial return on investment in outsourcing managed detection and response services to Blumira, Cross is quick to point to intangible benefits as well. He notes that replacing Blumira’s services would require adding dedicated, full-time employees to his team and displacing current staff.

“Greenleaf would have to hire full-time people in a very specialized field, with a fully loaded salary. But the biggest costs are in the intangibles; the human capital costs of training, hiring, attrition.”

The biggest benefit to Michael Cross might be the most intangible: peace of mind. “I’m fortunate as a CIO, knowing that I’ve got a trusted partner laser focused on security. Security doesn’t keep me up at night, compared to some of my peers.”

Additional Resources

PCI DSS Logging, Threat Detection and Response

When it comes to security event logging, reporting, audit trails, anomaly and threat detection, as well as tracking critical security control systems, Blumira helps you both meet and exceed PCI DSS compliance. Blumira’s cloud-based SIEM and security platform is PCI DSS compliant.

Learn more about replacing or upgrading your legacy SIEM to a modern SIEM platform with less overhead in:

• The Modern SIEM Evaluation Guide
• Replace Your SIEM: Traditional vs. Modern SIEM
• How Much is Your SIEM Solution Costing You?