Challenge
Playtech’s global cloud migration led to the creation of multiple cloud environments. This increased IT complexity.
Playtech wanted to enhance its prioritization of vulnerabilities. This would ensure that security teams were not overloaded with alerts and high-risk vulnerabilities and could improve timeliness of remediation.
Playtech believed it could enhance collaboration between the security and development teams by providing in-depth analysis and data surrounding cloud issues.
Solution
Playtech now enjoys a single, real-time granular view of its cloud assets worldwide.
Cloud security risks are contextualized and prioritized automatically, enabling Playtech’s security and development teams to expedite and increase the efficiency of their risk management processes.
Powerful data-driven insights are now shared across the security, development, and management teams, strengthening collaboration with developers empowered to remediate a significant number of vulnerabilities.
Searching for solutions to a highly distributed cloud landscape
Playtech is one of the world’s largest suppliers of online gambling technology, providing content, platform and technology services for the entire sector, including online casinos, poker rooms, bingo games, sports betting, scratch games, mobile gaming, live-dealer games and fixed-odds arcade games. The company is a FTSE 250 with headquarters in London and a global footprint. The company has enjoyed significant global growth since it was founded in 1999.
Playtech’s vision is to be the technology partner of choice for the world’s leading betting and gaming operators, delivering a safer, more engaging and entertaining betting and gaming experience, while also driving a more responsible and sustainable industry.
The company is currently engaged in an ambitious cloud migration program. Its goal is to enhance its capabilities to achieve faster delivery, easier maintenance, as well as the ability to provide more diverse and flexible services. To successfully maintain Playtech’s cloud security posture, the company’s security team wanted to enhance its ability to foster collaboration with development teams, using advanced tools to promote this critical relationship.
Playtech works with multiple cloud service providers, each with its own environment and architecture. This diverse portfolio provides flexibility, but also adds high levels of cloud complexity. For example, Playtech’s security team must support containers as well as standard workloads, load balancers and different network topologies.
A significant challenge of managing this multi-cloud environment is prioritizing cloud security vulnerabilities. According to Daniel Liber, Playtech’s CSO, his team wanted to enhance its capabilities to develop a more granular understanding and prioritization of issues and risks.
Our IT and development teams needed a greater understanding and prioritization of vulnerabilities so that our teams could more efficiently and appropriately give the level of scrutiny it required.
Daniel Liber, Chief Security Officer, Playtech
One of the other areas in focus was how best to enhance the ability to share accurate information to increase operational efficiency as much as possible with the resources at their disposal.
Using data and technology to contextualize risks
Playtech initially considered a range of options, including increasing headcount but the company soon focused on finding the right automated tool instead.
Liber says, “We realized we needed a tool with a very good understanding not only of individual vulnerabilities, but also their context and environment. When we explored the options, Wiz provided the range of solutions required to meet our needs.”
According to Liber, Wiz offered four significant advantages:
Technical capabilities to more effectively and efficiently support decision making and prioritization
Greater visibility of cloud environments and risks
A customer support team delivering superior service
A high-value vendor-customer relationship
Wiz listened to us and gave us the feeling we were working together, rather than simply giving us a tool to use.
Daniel Liber, Chief Security Officer, Playtech
Harnessing the full power of a critical cloud tool
At proof of concept, Wiz enhanced our ability to prioritize risk and provide context to the vulnerabilities it was identifying, says Liber. From that point, Wiz rapidly became a key tool, helping Playtech confidently migrate both new and existing workloads to the cloud, while supporting day-to-day risk mitigation.
The Wiz Security Graph in particular has helped Playtech harness the power of analytical tools, dashboards, and a wide range of reports, which have helped teams assess the company’s wider security posture and report to management.
The solution has also been integrated with ServiceNow to help manage digital workflows and multiple ticketing systems to ensure the right issues are shared with the right teams to address.
Building consensus, nurturing collaboration, empowering teams, and successfully mitigating risk
Playtech has been able to accelerate workload migration, without the need to increase headcount or other resources using Wiz. Additionally, the tools that Wiz provides enable the company’s security and development teams to respond faster while enhancing trust and collaboration internally.
Following the adoption of Wiz, we have seen improvement in the relationship between the development and security teams. There is now a consensus about how security should be perceived within cloud environments, and we work more effectively and efficiently together.
Daniel Liber, Chief Security Officer, Playtech
Wiz fulfilled other requirements as well, such as data and identity protection, enabling Playtech to consolidate multiple requirements into one tool, increasing the ROI. Wiz’s single dashboard also enables multiple stakeholders, including development teams and management, to see the same data in the same view.
Wiz is empowering teams to reach a swift consensus on risk mitigation, dramatically accelerating the speed of remediation
“Enabling teams such as DevOps to use Wiz was actually quite easy,” says Liber. “That’s because the tool is so intuitive, easy to use and straightforward to generate value. Every time we show an end user what else they can get out of Wiz, they are just as excited as we were when we first discovered it.”
