CUSTOMER CASE STUDY DIANA HOLDING

Food Industry Major
Enhances Protectionand Visibility with an
Integrated Approach toCybersecurity
Sophos strengthens network, endpoint and server security
for Diana Holding with an industry leading reliable, secureand high-performance firewall, EDR, and email security
solution.

CUSTOMER-AT-A-GLANCE
Industry
Food industry: edible oils, wine making,meat processing, commercial nurseries
Websitewww.dianaholding.ma/legroupe/presentation.html
Number of Users
500-999

Sophos Solutions
45 - XG Firewall (Full Guard)
830 licenses - Central Intercept X
Advanced with EDR (CIXA EDR)
79 licenses - Central Intercept X Advancedwith EDR for Server (CIXA EDR SERVER)
830 licenses - Central Email Advanced

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY DIANA HOLDING

Diana Holding is a Morocco based food conglomerate with a legacy of more than 40 years in the food industry.
It is a fast- growing organization, and this sterling growth means it needs to protect its IT infrastructure, dataand employees from cybercriminals. While the organization already had a cybersecurity infrastructure in place,
the growing number of employees meant that it wasn’t just their network perimeter that was under threat
but also their endpoints. They realized existing security solutions weren’t giving them the security net needed
to guard against rapidly evolving threats. As a result, they decided to build a comprehensive and advanced
cybersecurity infrastructure backed by security solutions that could proactively identify and mitigate threats.

Challenges
Ì A small IT team overwhelmed with the need tosecure users on and off the network, protect
every endpoint and manage the IT security
needs of a fast-growing organization.
Ì A growing need for better visibility, protection
and performance of an increasingly complex
and unique network environment.
Ì Switch from a standard endpoint
solution to an EDR one as recommended
by an ISO 27001 assessment.
Ì Difficult to assess the security of theIT environment as a large section of
the IT infrastructure was deployed in athird-party standard data centre.

Ì The existing legacy endpoint solution
was difficult manage and proving to
be incompatible with the increasing
sophistication of the IT environment.
Ì Growing realization that existing security
solutions were woefully inadequate toprotect against advanced threats anddid not offer, much needed, centralized
visibility, control, and management“While we have always beenaware about the need for
deploying cutting-edge
cybersecurity solutions toprotect our organization,
it was COVID-19 and thenumerous cyberattacks

targeting organizations
across the world during thistime, that impressed uponus the need to deploy thekind of solutions that canprotect us from threats thatcause business disruption,
reputational damage andreduce the possibility ofincurring fines resulting fromdata protection violations.”
Reda Loudiyi
Organization and Information Systems Director
Diana HoldingCUSTOMER CASE STUDY DIANA HOLDINGThe Case for Improved
Cybersecurity
The IT team lead by Mr. Reda is small anddynamic, but over a period of time he noticed theIT team’s reactivity to user request’s especiallyfrom the security perspective was going down.
The time to address requests was increasing
and with a growing threat landscape the team
couldn’t take a chance with the reactivity of theircybersecurity posture. Another problem was risk
visibility and the inability of existing solutions toidentify suspicious or malicious threats and offer
insights into network health. There was also alack of transparency into network traffic.

Diana Holding also had to comply with ISO –27001 regulation and the company’s security
framework including the legacy endpoint solution
was unable to meet the framework’s demand
for technical controls from the information risk
management perspective.
Also, a critical need was supplementing theirendpoint security with three critical security
capabilities namely detection, investigation,and response. “While researching the solutions
needed for improving our cybersecurity
infrastructure, we realized the need for endpoint
security empowered with EDR. Our core focus
was also on identifying a tool that was not only
value for money, but also easy to use, offeredsufficient protection capabilities and wasn’t
resource intensive.” explains Mr. Reda.

The existing endpoint was consuming a large
percentage of RAM/CPU services and wasn’t
delivering value on the malware protection front.
From the email standpoint, the organization
was experiencing spam and phishing attacks,
which the legacy endpoint solution wasn’t
able to prevent. Also, existing email securitycouldn’t address the organization’s security
concerns around Office 365.team wanted todeploy solutions that ranked well on third party

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY DIANA HOLDINGThe Road Towards
Sophos Deployment
Mr. Reda’s key focus area while searching fora replacement for existing solutions was thefeature set and its ability to protect the network
perimeter and endpoints from sophisticatedthreats, both known and unknown. Anotherimportant criterion was the local presenceof the vendor in Morocco and their reactivity
in addressing any issues that might crop up.
Sophos’ deep security roots in Morocco andstrong partnerships was one of the key reasons
why the client chose Sophos.
Apart from product capabilities, another key
attribute the IT team was looking for was anaffordably priced product that delivered premier
security features, and meaningful ROI. Sophos
ticked all the boxes in this regard. And, finally,

the team wanted to deploy solutions that ranked
well on third party reports, and Sophos has done
really well on third-party assessment reports
such as AV Comparatives, SE Labs, AV-TEST andmore.

Network Security: Sophos Firewall’s Xstreamarchitecture delivers exceptional visibility
by removing the blind spots resulting fromencrypted traffic, through SSL inspection andat the same time, the firewall ensures zero
performance disruption.

Sophos Deployment

Also, the firewall’s highspeed deep packet
inspection (DPI) engine scans the organization’s
traffic for threats. The firewall stack offloads thecomplete process to the DPI engine to reduce
latency and improve overall efficiency. The highperformance streaming DPI includes next-genIPS, web protection, app control, deep learningand sandboxing powered by SophosLabs Intelix.
This ensures the organization is protectedagainst the latest ransomware and databreaches.

There were many moving parts in thedeployment process and many holding
subsidiaries that the solutions had to be
deployed on; complete deployment, therefore,
took 3 months. The configuration of Sophos’ssecurity solutions also needed to align with the IT
architecture requirements.
Sophos’s comprehensive cybersecurity
evaluation identified a layered and synchronized
security approach to bolster the Diana Holding’s
cybersecurity infrastructure.

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY DIANA HOLDING

There Endpoint Security with EDR: With
Intercept X Advanced with EDR and Intercept
X Advanced with EDR for Server Diana Holding
benefits from a powerful endpoint detection
and response (EDR) combined with toprated endpoint protection. Purpose built for
combining IT security operations and threat
hunting, this endpoint solution uses AI-driven
analysis to detect and investigate suspicious
activity.
It blocks ransomware attacks at the gates bydetecting malicious encryption processes andany encrypted files are rolled back to a safestate. This allows Diana Holding employees towork uninterruptedly, minimizing any impact
to business continuity.
This solution delivers features such as web
protection, exploit prevention, download
reputation, peripheral control, application
control, deep learning malware detection,
anti-malware scanning, PUA blocking andmore. It offers comprehensive protectionthat covers attack surface, protection before
malware runs on device, stops running
threats, and delivers the benefit of detection,
investigation, remediation coupled withhuman-led threat hunting and response.

ResultsAlso, the Server Lockdown feature ensures
only trusted applications will run on theservers and the IT team at Diana Holding cando this with single click without incurring
server downtime.
Email Security: Delivered through a single
plane of glass dashboard on Sophos Central,
Sophos’ email security protects Diana Holding
employees from malicious email threats withAI enabled protection. It works in tandem with
Sophos Endpoint protection to automaticallydetect and clean infected computers that aresending malware and outbound spam.
Cutting-edge email protection helps prevent
data loss and drives content control with
policy-based email encryption. With enforced
TLS encryption, messages in transit cannot
be intercepted by cybercriminals and pushbased encryption helps encrypt the wholeemail or its attachment. And, the O365 add-inbutton allows you send secure messages
quickly. These features and others havedelivered extensive email protection to Diana
Holding and its employees.

Server protection automatically detects AWS,Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud workloads
and other critical cloud services to zero in on
malicious activities, identify insecure cloud
deployment and plug security holes.
Copyright 2021 Sophos Ltd. All rights reserved.
Registered in England and Wales No. 2096520, The Pentagon, Abingdon Science Park, Abingdon, OX14 3YP, UKSophos is a registered trademark of Sophos Ltd. All other product and company names mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

The Synchronized Security delivered by the triadof security solutions has given Diana Holding
an expansive security cover that delivers realtime protection against advanced threats. Today,
the organization is assured that it can meet
all ISO270001 compliance standards and will
face no problems in confidently renewing theircertification. The deployment of email security has
also had a very real impact on the number of spamand phishing email they are now receiving.
Mr. Reda believes cybersecurity posture has adirect and positive impact on customer trust
and the deployment of Sophos solutions hasensured the prevalence of customer trust, which
is priceless. Also, all deployed Sophos solutions
are simple to use, manage and control, without asteep learning curve. This has enabled the IT team
to approach security in a proactive manner, andrespond to user requests quickly and effectively.
What’s more, from the IT resources perspective,
the IT team has experienced a reduced
consumption of RAM, disk space and noticeable
improvement in CPU performance.
“With Sophos we have experienced tremendous
security ROI and we have decided to go ahead
with additional Sophos solution to strengthen ourIT infrastructure. This includes Sophos MDM formobile security and Phish Threat for promoting
security awareness amongst our employees.
Sophos has not only improved the security postureof Diana Holding, but also increased the efficiencyof the IT team. We recommend it to anyone whowants to build a resilient IT security infrastructure
backed by timely vendor support,” signs off Mr.
Reda.