Case Study

Australian National
University Fosters a Safer
Campus with Zero Trust

Challenges• Establishing the right foundation for a Zero Trust
network architecture

Gigamon [has] helped us move beyond• Securing a hybrid cloud environment

playing whack-a-mole and chasing every• Improving cybersecurity posture to protect student,

vulnerability, toward a more strategic

staff, and university dataapproach to cybersecurity. It gives us theSolutions

data we need to build network resilience,• GigaVUE® Cloud Suite

reduce our attack surface, and make it• GigaVUE HC Seriesharder for threat actors to impact ourenvironment.
SUTHAGAR SEEVARATNAMCISO of Australian National University• GigaVUE-FM• GigaSMART®
Customer Benefits• Achieved deep visibility into devices, networks, andtraffic across 60 sites• Established a solid foundation for a zero trust
environment• Ease of deployment and enterprise-wide visibility© 2023 Gigamon. All rights reserved.

1

CASE STUDY | AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

About the Customer
The Australian National University (ANU) is one of theworld’s great universities. Located in Australia’s capital,Canberra, the ANU employs 4,500 academic andprofessional staff, serving about 10,000 undergraduate
and 11,000 postgraduate students. It has sevenacademic colleges and an endowment of $1.8 billion
dollars as of 2018. Suthagar Seevaratnam is theuniversity’s CISO, a position he has held for three years.

Business Challenge
The university experienced a data breach in 2018,
which Seevaratnam and his team traced to a likely
phishing email. The attack served as a wake-up callfor the team to improve the university’s security
posture. Educational institutions are one of themost attacked sectors, according to a 2020 global
intelligence threat report by NTT Data, a Japanese
IT services company. According to the report, theeducation sector was subjected to 38 percent of all
attacks in 2019, second only to the government sector.
Seevaratnam recognized that cyberattacks were on
the rise and took aggressive steps to strengthen theuniversity’s security strategy.
Seevaratnam was especially concerned about attacks
combining both ransomware and data exfiltration. He
knew that focusing on one type of attack alone would
be insufficient. With the increasing sophistication ofcyberattacks and the increasing complexity of theuniversity’s IT infrastructure, Seevaratnam decided
a Zero Trust approach was the best path forward.

Resolution
After examining a variety of vendors, Seevaratnam
chose Gigamon to serve as one of the core platforms
to take the university’s network architecture in a Zero
Trust strategic direction. In a hybrid environment
typical of most universities, this made good sense.
A fundamental tenet of Zero Trust is “Never trust,© 2023 Gigamon. All rights reserved.

always verify” — and that applies to the network
as well as users and devices. Gigamon enables
the organization to close visibility gaps in devices,
networks, and traffic, so it can better detect hidden
and emerging threats. This deep observability into alldata in motion on ANU’s network, on premises andin the cloud, enables the university to strengthen its
resilience and keep attacks at bay.
The university deployed more than 350 Gigamon
devices across 2 data centers and more than 60 sites,
covering the ANU Acton campus and numerous otherlocations throughout Australia. The university also
deployed virtual network terminal access points (TAPs)
to provide visibility into more than 26 VMware ESXi
hosts. GigaSMART expands these capabilities withdeeper intelligence to improve visibility into application
traffic. Built-in sensors feed NetFlow and application
metadata attributes from GigaSMART to threat hunting
solutions, providing additional insight into how schools
are using applications.
Gigamon has enabled the university to close its visibility
gaps and to track activity for any device, network, andtraffic type, including East-West traffic. Detailed datafrom GigaSMART is fed into an asset discovery andcybersecurity automation tool to identify, segment,
and enforce compliance of every connected device on
the network. The combined solution discovereda huge set of potentially vulnerable devices exposedto the internet, including Internet of Things (IoT)
devices, medical IoT devices, and devices withend-of-life (EOL) operating systems. The university
environment is constantly changing and growing, so
ANU has partnered with Gigamon to have an engineer
on site full time to optimize and expand the visibility
that Gigamon delivers for the ANU.
Gigamon is also integrated with ExtraHop, a leading
network analytics solution. This is helping the security
team establish baselines on performance metrics
to ensure their ongoing digital transformation is as
successful as possible.

2CASE STUDY | AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Benefit“Gigamon [has] helped us move beyond playing whack-a-mole and chasing every vulnerability, toward a morestrategic approach to cybersecurity. It gives us the data we need to build network resilience, reduce our attack
surface, and make it harder for threat actors to impact our environment,” Seevaratnam shared.
Gigamon provides the university with the deep visibility and high-fidelity adversary detection that it needs tostrengthen its cybersecurity posture. The integrated solution provides a solid foundation for ANU to implementa zero trust approach, which is truly a paradigm shift in terms of network architecture. With the telemetry
achieved through this modern security stack, ANU now has the tools it needs to prevent future incidents andsafeguard its infrastructure.

About Gigamon
Gigamon offers a deep observability pipeline that harnesses actionable network-level intelligence to amplify
the power of observability tools. This powerful combination enables IT organisations to assure security andcompliance governance, speed root-cause analysis of performance bottlenecks, and lower operational overhead
associated with managing hybrid and multi-cloud IT infrastructures. The result: modern enterprises realize thefull transformational promise of the cloud. Gigamon serves more than 4,000 customers worldwide, including
over 80 percent of Fortune 100 enterprises, nine of the 10 largest mobile network providers, and hundreds ofgovernments and educational organisations worldwide. To learn more, please visit gigamon.com.

Worldwide Headquarters
3300 Olcott Street, Santa Clara, CA 95054 USA+1 (408) 831-4000 | gigamon.com© 2022-2023 Gigamon. All rights reserved. Gigamon and the Gigamon logo are trademarks of Gigamon in the United States and/or other countries.
Gigamon trademarks can be found at gigamon.com/legal-trademarks.html. All other trademarks are the trademarks of their respective owners. Gigamon reserves the right to change, modify, transfer, or otherwise revise this publication without notice.
06.23_02© 2023 Gigamon. All rights reserved.

3