By Christy Lynch
As one of the largest communications service providers in France, Bouygues Telecom prioritizes information security as highly as one might expect. “Due to the nature of our business, there is a strong security culture within Bouygues Telecom and we take data protection very seriously indeed,” says Jean-Pierre Blanc, Security Manager.
It should come as no surprise then that the Bouygues’ security team understands the importance of proactively managing and securing their privileged accounts— the very first step that organizations typically need to take in order to stop targeted attacks and mitigate potential damages to business operations.
In early 2012, however, Bouygues was faced with a challenging situation. In order to address their privileged account security, the company had previously developed two custom-built, in-house systems to manage the 10,000 privileged accounts existing in the company’s network. However, both of these systems were becoming outdated and increasingly costly to maintain and overhaul. The existing models were also unable to deliver the level of security and scalability necessary to meet the company’s growing needs.
Enter CyberArk. After reviewing several other solutions, Blanc and his team decided to deploy CyberArk’s Privileged Identity Management (PIM) and Privileged Session Management (PSM) suites. The solutions merged to provide Bouygues with a unified and comprehensive privileged account security platform that manages and secures the company’s IT infrastructure, while isolating business-critical systems from potential malware attacks and continuously monitoring critical servers, databases, web applications and virtual environments. Bouygues was able to complete the implementation in just three months.
According to Blanc, “CyberArk offered the most comprehensive solutions through which to cover all bases and meet all our initial objectives from the deployment.” He continued, “we now have solutions in place that allow us to more accurately and efficiently trace all privileged activity and secure and control internal and external access – something which is particularly important, as we entrust privileged credentials to external sources.”
While the CyberArk team is very proud to support this deployment and provide Bouygues with robust, proactive security solutions, we remain committed to taking things to the next level and ensuring that the company can maintain continuous business operations—something inherently critical to sustaining an excellent standard of customer service. “Customer service is absolutely key to our business and CyberArk’s excellent support throughout the course of the deployment has been vital in enabling us to maintain our highest standards of customer care during the transition period,” said Blanc.
Moving forward, Bouygues’ long term aim is to move to a more virtualized environment. Fortunately, CyberArk solutions are easily scalable and will grow with the business – supporting a move to virtualize much of their corporate environment in the future.
For more information, check out our Bouygues Telecom case study.
