Challenge
Security, development, and cloud operations teams worked in silos, each using different tools with limited information sharing, forcing teams to rely on email and manual handoffs
SOC analysts were flooded with alerts from multiple sources that lacked cloud and organizational context, making prioritization and correlation difficult
Limited visibility across multi-cloud environments created unknown blind spots the team could not identify with existing solutions
The SOC team lacked cloud security expertise and detection engineering for cloud-specific events
Solution
Adopted Wiz’s security graph to correlate signals from across cloud environments into a single, unified view
Revamped the operations for the entire 24/7 Security Operations team with Wiz Defend as the foundation for cloud observability and threat correlation
Enabled security, development, and cloud operations teams to access the same context-rich security data through a centralized platform
Within one month
achieved full visibility across all cloud environments
24/7 SecOps team
now uses Wiz Defend as its primary platform for threat triage and response of cloud events
Significantly reduced
communication overhead and SecOps workload through clearer prioritization and shared context
Supporting Global Consulting at Cloud Scale
Founded in 1983, ZS is a global management consulting and technology firm with more than 15,000 employees in 40-plus offices worldwide. ZS specializes in providing consulting services, technology, and software solutions partnering with companies to improve life and how we live it. ZS mission is to transform ideas into impact by bringing together data, science, technology and human ingenuity to deliver better outcomes for all. Many engagements begin as consulting projects and quickly evolve into complex technical implementations, often involving sensitive and regulated data.
Val Mushinskiy, VP of Cloud Services at ZS, has seen this evolution firsthand during his more than 25 year tenure. For the past decade, he has led the cloud engineering team through an increasingly complex multi-cloud transformation. As ZS expanded its cloud footprint to support global operations and client delivery, security complexity grew alongside it. The team needed a way to secure their environments without slowing down the business.
The Silo Problem: Security Without a Shared Source of Truth
Before Wiz, ZS faced a familiar challenge, security silos. Different teams operated with separate tools and limited visibility into one another’s work.
One of the biggest objectives we wanted to address was breaking the silos between our teams. Security teams were looking at their issues, while development teams relied on information shared through emails or other channels. There was a lot of disconnect as well as back and forth.
Val Mushinskiy, VP of Cloud Services, ZS Associates
These disconnects made incident response slow and inefficient. When issues surfaced, teams struggled to identify ownership and assemble the full context. Information lived in different systems, and coordination required emails, meetings, and manual correlation. During that time, risks often remained unresolved.
The challenge was especially acute for ZS’s 24/7 SecOps. Alerts from managed security providers often arrived without sufficient cloud or organizational context. Analysts were left sorting through high volumes of alerts with limited insight into what mattered most.
“The single biggest challenge for the modern SOC is information overload and the ability to quickly understand what to act on first,” Mushinskiy explained.
Adding to the concern, the team suspected blind spots across their cloud environments. Without unified visibility, they had no reliable way to confirm what they were missing or how exposed they might be.
The Security Graph: Connecting the Dots Across Cloud Environments
When ZS evaluated cloud security platforms, they were looking for a way to clearly understand how activity and risk connected across their cloud environments. Wiz stood out for its ability to bring signals together and present them through a single security graph, giving teams shared visibility without manual correlation.
Wiz was pulling in information from many different sources and correlating it into one graph. It helped us see how information flows through our systems, instead of trying to stitch things together across tools.
Val Mushinskiy, VP of Cloud Services, ZS Associates
That value became clear early. During the proof of concept, ZS connected Wiz across their environments and quickly gained a unified view of their cloud footprint, with consistent context across services, workloads, and identities.
Within a month of full deployment, ZS achieved complete visibility across their cloud environments. That visibility became the foundation for a broader shift in how they approached security operations, with Wiz Defend at one of the foundational elements for the re-imagined function.
Revamping the Security Operations Team: From Alert Overload to Focused Response
With clearer visibility, ZS made a strategic decision to rethink their SOC. Rather than layering Wiz onto existing workflows, they revamped the operations for their Security Operations Team with Wiz Defend as part of the core platform for cloud insights.
“Defend came at the right time, as we were already rethinking our SOC strategy,” Mushinskiy said. “We revamped the Security Operations and made Wiz Defend the cornerstone for cloud observability and correlation.”
This shift directly addressed alert fatigue. Previously, analysts spent significant time piecing together incomplete information. With Wiz Defend, each alert comes with cloud context, relationships, and risk prioritization.
Wiz Defend helped us prioritize information and significantly reduce workload for the 24X7 SecOps team, so the team can focus on critical events first and then look at lower-level trends.
Val Mushinskiy, VP of Cloud Services, ZS Associates
Today, the ZS Security Operations relies on Wiz Defend as its primary interface for cloud related threats and investigations. Analysts can quickly understand where an issue occurred, what resources are involved, and which team owns remediation. The result is faster triage and more confident response.
“The biggest impact has been the ability to quickly understand and triage events with the right context and analysis for resolution,” Mushinskiy said.
Breaking Down Silos: Faster Handoffs and Clear Ownership
The impact of Wiz extended beyond the SOC. By giving security, development, and cloud operations teams access to the same platform, ZS reduced friction across the organization.
One of the easiest wins to see is the reduction in communication between teams. We can move information much faster and quickly identify ownership.
Val Mushinskiy, VP of Cloud Services, ZS Associates
Development teams now see how security issues affect their applications. Cloud operations teams understand how configurations influence risk. Security teams have the context needed to route issues to the right owners. Coordination is faster, and resolution requires fewer handoffs.
As Mushinskiy described it, Wiz delivered meaningful improvements in “visibility and actionability across vulnerabilities and both active and potential threats.”
What’s Next: Expanding Context and Automating Response
Looking ahead, ZS plans to expand Wiz access across more teams. The goal is to ensure that everyone who touches infrastructure or code, from development to security to cloud operations, works from the same source of truth.
“Our next step is getting all teams that touch infrastructure or code to use central tooling with the context they need to resolve issues quickly,” said Mushinskiy. The vision is a shared platform that supports secure development and operations at scale, without slowing teams down.
At the same time, ZS is looking to go further with automation and AI. Wiz is already providing AI-driven insights that help the team better understand what’s happening across their environments and categorize events more effectively. Over time, this has enabled the
Security Operations team to bucket and triage activity more efficiently, separating real risk from noise.
Looking forward, the team believes this foundation will allow them to automatically resolve a growing number of non-events. By combining unified context with AI-powered analysis, ZS aims to reduce manual effort even further and let their teams focus on the issues that truly require human attention.
Together, these next steps reflect ZS’s broader direction, expanding shared visibility, pushing security earlier in the lifecycle, and using automation to scale secure cloud operations as the business continues to grow.
