Eagers adopts a cybersecurity-first approach in digital transformation

Australia and New Zealand automotive retailer Eagers Automotive Pty Ltd (Eagers) is partnering with Check Point Software Technologies Ltd (Check Point) to increase control and visibility of its cloud environment applications.

Eagers says it chose Check Point’s CloudGuard solution to help automate governance and manage complexities across multi-cloud assets and services.

It improved visibility into cloud environment to ensure compliance across both AWS and Azure, shift left capabilities and with simple unified management to support a team of three security professionals.

Eagers serves customers across 180 sites in both countries with its four lines of business, including car retailing, truck retailing, property and investments. To stay ahead of its game, the company says it relies on technology to transform the automotive experience with a DevOps team focused on dealership apps, mobile apps, and one-stop online car sales.

A key milestone for Eagers digital transformation was adopting a cloud-based environment that could encompass the complexities of its business operations. It started by migrating its on-premises Microsoft Exchange environment to Office 365. 

From there, the IT team migrated servers to AWS and Azure. The roadmap includes more applications and in-house development to be moved into the cloud, and the security team needed an easier way to see—and secure—everything.

With a safety-first approach being foundational to the automotive industry, the team felt that relying on native AWS or Azure cloud security tools wasn’t enough. However, with limited resourcing of a small team, they needed better visibility into each environment to increase security controls for their cloud-based assets. 

But visibility alone wouldn’t deliver the expected results. Eagers’ National Information Security, Risk & Governance Manager team needed a solution that offered management simplicity, enabling more time to focus on improving operations and customer experience. And they wanted a vendor with proven expertise so they could lean expertise, again focusing on improving/growing business

“We could scan for vulnerabilities in each cloud environment, but the native tools didn’t really cover all of the functions we needed,” Eagers Automotive national information security, risk and governance manager Mark Nix. 

“We needed a better solution for gaining visibility and ensuring compliance, which also allowed us to shift-left capabilities to implement security into the new development at the code level.” 

He says Check Point Software was chosen for its state-of-the-art cybersecurity solutions beyond threat prevention. It also ensured continuous posture alignment with DevOps best practices and enabled DevSecOps to build security into the code pipeline.

“Check Point CloudGuard delivers a well-rounded approach to cloud and DevOps security,” Nix says. “Best of all, we can manage the entire environment from one place instead of having multiple management interfaces for different parts. That’s key for us.”

“We’re excited to support Eagers with our cloud security solutions and enhancing their cyber security posture,” Check Point Software Australia and New Zealand managing director Les Williamson says. 

“With automated security functions and visibility over the entire business from a single pane of glass, Eagers operating environment now has best practice cloud protection utilising a prevention-first approach, enabling the team to focus on progressing its digital transformation roadmap.”

Check Point CloudGuard Network Security provides unified, cloud-native security across applications, workloads, and networks against the most sophisticated threats. With it, the Eagers team gained visualisation of all cloud traffic, security alerts, assets and auto-remediation from a single platform. Enriched contextual information from multiple log sources delivers a fast, clear understanding of events in either cloud environment.

CloudGuard Posture Management plays several critical roles for Eagers. The company had invested significantly in best-in-class DevOps production, shared, and testing environments. Its security policies are also written following ISO standards. Now, the team can visualise and assess security posture, detect misconfigurations, and model, modify and automate processes to actively enforce gold-standard policies. 

Shift Left, Move Forward

CloudGuard’s shift left capabilities are replacing the team’s previous open source toolsets—and taking them further. Instead of manually reviewing individual code or outsourcing the function, CloudGuard will automatically search for vulnerabilities as code moves through various gates to production. If a vulnerability is detected, the code cannot proceed further until it meets the standard required.

“Shift left capabilities are critical going forward,” Nix says. “We’re monitoring code now with CloudGuard and plan to make code security automatic and part of the normal DevOps pipeline.”

“Some products out there focus only on compliance, some on posture, and others on DevOps. CloudGuard does it all, which was our key determinant,” he says.