CUSTOMER CASE STUDY SERENA HOTELS

Sophos Delivers
Synchronized Defence
Against Advanced CyberThreats to a Top Hotel Brand
Serena Hotels is one of the world’s leading hospitality brands, with a collectionof 23 unique hotels, resorts, safari lodges and camps located across Africa.
Focusing on meeting the most demanding customer requirements, each andevery Serena property offers a unique hospitality experience that is purely
customer focused. The brand has experienced tremendous growth over theyears resulting in a rapidly growing IT infrastructure spread across distributed
locations. This means Serena has to address a continuously expanding attack
surface and traditional security solutions were proving to be incapable of doing
so. The brand was therefore looking to move to a single vendor approach
towards securing its IT infrastructure and protecting its assets with a proactive
approach to security. Sophos and its powerful portfolio of security solutions
perfectly fit its needs.

CUSTOMER-AT-A-GLANCE
Serena Hotels
Kenya
Industry
Hospitality

Websitewww.serenahotels.com

Sophos Solutions
Sophos XG Firewall
Sophos Intercept X Advanced– 1050 Licenses
Sophos Intercept X Advancedfor Servers - 151 Licenses

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY SERENA HOTELS“Rapid growth of our business meant an equally rapid increase of attack
surface. In order to address modern day threats, we wanted to build
an integrated cybersecurity infrastructure, that increased our ability tostop cyberthreats, from device to cloud and in the present and future.“Chrispine Mboga, Country IT Manager, Kenya

Challenges
Ì Lack of a robust UTM technology
with flexible and simple configurationinterface, sold at a good price point.
Ì Risk to global rampant ransomware prevalencein the absence of a security solution that
focuses on dealing with ransomware attacks.
Ì Lack of synchronized defense in a multi-layer
security implementation. Existing solutions
were acting alone without the synchronizationof threat intelligence and unified protection.
Ì Lack of central management ofconfigurable security policies acrossmultiple sites/locations and countries,
within a single management portal.
Ì Limited visibility of threat and protection
data and that too available through acomplex, difficult-to-use portal.

Serena Hotels was using a range of different UTM
appliances and endpoint solutions before moving
to Sophos. Security solutions from different
vendors resulted in disparate data coming fromdifferent installations. It was becoming difficult
to keep track of all security statistics coming theIT Team’s way and quickly pushing policies that
kept the network and endpoint safe and secure.
The team was also disappointed with their rigidity,complex configurations and limited administrative/troubleshoot tool sets.
“Limited features, yet a high cost of purchase andsubscription of our threat management appliances
was a cause of concern for us. A quickly evolving
cyber threat landscape highlighted by rampant
prevalence of ransomware made us realize that alayered security architecture made up of security
solutions from different security vendors was not
the way ahead. We needed to move to a moreadvanced security paradigm,” explains Mr. Chrispine.

The IT team felt their endpoint security was thelast point of defense, yet the most vulnerable as
their existing endpoint solutions were not evolving
fast enough to catch up with newer threats. Also,
their existing security solutions did not focus ondetecting and stopping ransomware attacks whilein the process also decrypting any files that gethijacked.
Moreover, these had a heavy computing resource
footprint therefore becoming a bottleneck toefficient computing both at the server andworkstation level.
Another problem area was the on-prem deploymentof management console for end point solutions,which required regular upgrades and higher
administrative overheads for the IT Team.

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY SERENA HOTELSThe key focus of their search for a new security
partner was to deploy solutions from a single
vendor, but also benefit from the firewall andendpoint talking to each other, sharing threat
intelligence; and building a cybersecurity
infrastructure wherein security incidents areremediated with automated response.

How Did Sophos Deliver AllEncompassing Security,Managed Simply andEffectively?
Serena Hotels worked with Microskills Information
Technologies (Kenya) Limited, a Sophos Partner
who coordinated Proof of Concept testing. After
thorough pre-sales discussions and productfunctionalities review and facilitation of productdemos, the IT Team was convinced Sophos
products perfectly addressed their security
challenges.
With XG Firewall, Serena Hotels gets the bestprotection to stop advanced threats before they
have a chance to cause havoc on the network.
Features like Deep Packet Inspection, Encrypted
Traffic, Web Protection, Zero-Day and ML Protection,
Advanced Threat Protection, Cloud Sandbox andmore, protect Serena’s network from the latest
hacks. The Secure Sophos VPN Client enables the IT
Team to conform with social distance norms as themajority of their staff work from home. The staff cansecurely access critical business applications at atime when it is imperative to maintain productivity,
but still not expose the staff to the threat ofinfection.

With Sophos Intercept X Advanced for Endpoint andServer, the IT Team benefits from rich and powerfulfeatures that reduce the attack surface suchas web security, peripheral control, web control,
application control, and download reputation. Also,
malware threats are stopped before they run on thedevice with security features such as anti-malware
file scanning, deep learning malware detection, preexecution behavioral analysis (HIPS) and more.
“Sophos Intercept X delivers specialized layered
protection for our endpoints that predictively
prevents ransomware attacks, and withCryptoGuard, we know that any changes to the files
will be rolled back in real time. This has definitely
given us peace of mind knowing Intercept X isprotecting our endpoints and servers in real time,from ransomware attacks,” says Mr. Chrispine.

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY SERENA HOTELS

A key area of concern for the IT team was theinability of the disparate security installations towork in deep synergy and Synchronized Security
had solved this problem for them. “With Security
Heartbeat™ linking our Sophos Endpoint withthe Sophos XG Firewall, threat intelligence is
now shared in real time enabling multi-layered
automated coordinated response to isolate threatsand prevent the spread of malware activity acrossthe network,” explains Mr. Chrispine.
Sophos Central delivers multi tenancy sub-estates
on a single management portal. Previously, the ITteam was saddled with an exclusive standalone
management console with different sets of security
policies configured on each instance for each site/
location. With Sophos Central, the IT Team has
overcome this challenge as a uniform approach
can be leveraged to push the same set of policiesacross different sites and installations.

“Apart from the deep and detailed, yet simple
reporting and Threat Analysis that the IT Team gets
visibility into, we are also pleased with the diverse
UTM subscription offerings, which allows us tochoose a subscription that perfectly addresses ourneeds. Also, on-premise security solutions havegiven way to solutions hosted on the cloud, allmanaged with a single pane of glass delivered by
Sophos Central. This has improved the efficiency of
the IT Team and brought down the IT-centric costs,”
says Mr. Chrispine.
Sophos also made specific customized
configurations on the Sophos Central to ensure
Serena Hotels can effectively use a multi-tenancy
Sun-Estate to group and manage their devices
according to custom policies for their different
sites (27 branches) in the 6 different countries they
operate in.

What were the businessresults of Sophos
Deployment?
The Sophos solutions were deployed over a periodof 2 months with the help of a Sophos Sales
Engineer for Kenya. This was in line with Serena’s
approach to deploying new IT assets. Any new
deployment for Serena Hotels involves initial proofof concept testing, followed by a one-month inproduct pilot at one site and thereafter concurrent
deployment across the rest of the sites over theensuing month.
The IT Team also attended Sophos Administrator
Certification Training that gave them a deeper
understanding of the technologies andconfiguration for the solutions.

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY SERENA HOTELS“Our experience of using Sophos Professional
Services was excellent. The Sophos TechnicalEngineer helped ensure a quicker deployment, while
guiding us to tailor the solutions to our preferred
security architecture, in the process helping us toefficiently troubleshoot any emergent “teething”
issues,” says Mr. Chrispine.
From the cybersecurity standpoint Serena Hotels
experienced enhanced cybersecurity and improved
security and threat visibility. They also benefited
from significant costs savings by deploying
secure multi-country VPN connections to replace
expensive point-to-point data connectivity throughconnectivity providers/carriers.
The IT team finds it simpler to manage all Sophos
solutions compared to the previous solutions
they used. This saves time, improves efficiency,and increases confidence in the cybersecurity
infrastructure.

With Sophos, the team’s multi-level layered
approach to security remains the same, butchanges have been made around proactive andreactive security administrative action courtesy thesimplicity of Sophos Central reporting and reliabilityof the deployed Sophos solutions.
“We plan to progressively scale up Sophos solutions
across all the layers of security architecture,
deepening our uptake of the whole spectrum ofavailable Sophos cybersecurity solutions, especiallywhere consolidation of protection management andfurther opportunities for heartbeat synchronization
can be leveraged. Sophos offers value for money,
and works seamlessly, leaving more time forInformation Technology personnel to focus
on business innovation and the core businessapplications. We recommend it to any organizationthat wants a proactive approach to security, thatcan be managed easily and effectively,” signs off Mr.
Chrispine.

For more information on
how Sophos can help you,please visit sophos.com

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