Ixom Achieves Secure Segmentation Across Environments With Illumio

Overview and challenges

Ixom, a leading industrial chemical manufacturer based in Melbourne, faced multiple IT challenges securing legacy applications that require unsupported platforms for continued operations, as well as the desire to network harden critical IT infrastructure to decrease the risk from vulnerabilities.

With a portfolio of global businesses across geographies, cloud infrastructure was critical to gaining efficiencies. Yet governing cloud environments posed its own security challenges.

A transition from Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) routing to a Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) allowed Ixom’s core IT team to decouple controls from the network for more agility and effectiveness.

Adopting a Zero Trust security approach, they sought an allow-listing solution to limit exposure by preventing unauthorized access to any system. But manual methods proved untenable, both to architect and maintain.

How Illumio helped

Ixom chose SaaS-based Illumio Core to enforce Zero Trust across environments, allowing them to safely ringfence vulnerable applications from their other systems and gain visibility and control in the cloud.

Deployment of the agent took two days. Ixom first locked down standard traffic before looking for anomalous behavior and working with application owners to remediate; they then modeled policy changes prior to enforcement in order to avoid any disruption.

“We change behavior, install the new way, and easily find the people not adopting it before we turn things off. The visibility into policy modeling prevents risk because we know the impact of changes before we enforce.”

Illumio Core is one of the easiest products to get going ... The challenge with Illumio is that we get such good visibility that we’re met with questions we didn’t even know to ask. It did not necessarily make things easier, but it made things possible because we couldn’t have done it otherwise. Security wouldn’t have been as tight, risks would have been vastly higher, effort greater, and the end result not nearly as good.

Results and benefits

• Visibility across environments
  The IT team can govern policy across data center, cloud, legacy, and other applications — whatever they are and wherever they run — from a single view using the real-time application dependency map.
• Application ringfencing with Zero Trust confidence
  Illumio Core’s granular microsegmentation and allow-listing capabilities ensured prevention of unauthorized access.
• Ease of use in policy management
  Lowering the administrative burden to quickly and visually see anomalies or vulnerabilities made it ideal for outsourcing operations.
• SIEM and technical management support
  Ixom is now looking to integrate Illumio Core with its SIEM for Security Operations and ServiceNow to true up its CMDB.