Having this kind of a partner gives you comfort and confidence that you can relay to your customers that their data is secure, both during the sales cycle and over the course of ongoing support
Bill Thornton, Vice President, Tango
Headquartered in Irving, Texas, the company serves more than 130 customers in over 140 countries, managing over 250,000 locations. The Tango team includes innovators in GIS and predictive analytics who are pioneers in location management. Over the years, Tango has served more than 700 brands, many that are household names. Tango offers the only comprehensive location management solution delivered as a service, continually expanding its offerings to drive opportunity and fuel growth.
The Challenge
Security is at the forefront of everything Tango does. More than just an IT function, security management is approached as a business strategy embedded in all core operations from software development to securing customer data. When the company deployed the AWS platform to migrate all operations to the cloud, the security of customer and company data — including software code — became a top priority. Because even though AWS has security tools built in, they needed to be configured, reviewed and monitored manually. This became a burden for the small team Tango devoted to cloud security — tasked not only with reviewing logs, but also filtering out noise to keep up with changing threats and rapidly identify high-priority risks.
The team quickly became overwhelmed with the amount of time it took to review the logs. Because the team’s IT responsibilities required every member to wear multiple hats, it also struggled with a lack of real-time alerts. These challenges led to concerns about conceivable gaps in Tango’s cloud security.
Tango Vice President Bill Thornton describes becoming “concerned about missing key things that could become potential issues.”Another area of concern was the company’s realization that it didn’t have the deep experience required to understand and prioritize threats.“Identifying what was a real threat and what was noise was difficult,” Thornton says.
To Tango, the task of finding the tools and resources with the maturity and expertise to fully understand the ever-changing cybersecurity environment seemed overwhelming. The cost, time and effort required to secure the cloud had also begun taking the company’s eye off its primary goals of providing location-management software for customers.
The solution was finding a partner who could deliver:
- Real-time, 24×7 security monitoring
- Actionable threat analysis and intelligence
- Access to the resources and expertise critical in today’s evolving cyber security ecosystem
- Compliance with regulatory mandates such as SOC 2
- A breadth of security solutions
Honestly, the attack wouldn’t have been something that we would have caught without Alert Logic because we didn’t know how to put the patterns together.
Bill Thornton, Vice President
Why Alert Logic?
Tango selected Alert Logic after a review process that included demonstrations and customer references. The decision was made based on the extensive scope of Alert Logic’s cloud security solutions as well as the company’s positive reputation in the marketplace. “The breadth of the solutions, the support from specialized resources and the escalation and tracking for the entire stack are the most valuable Alert Logic capabilities,” Thornton says. “Most other solutions in the space offer tools, but not the integrated specialized personnel to provide an overall business solution.”
Initially, Tango implemented Alert Logic Professional for the network intrusion detection solution (NIDS). Tango immediately saw the benefits after the Alert Logic team of experts detected attack patterns coming from China and made recommendations to the Tango team on how to address them. “We implemented those recommendations immediately to ensure none of the traffic coming from that area could have access to our system,” Thornton says. Fortunately, a breach was averted, but Tango found the persistence of the hackers troubling. Tango was pleased that Alert Logic found the attack patterns and prevented data from being compromised. “Honestly, it wouldn’t have been something that we would have caught without Alert Logic because we didn’t know how to put the patterns together,” Thornton says.
After four years of success with Alert Logic’s intrusion detection system (IDS) and Alert Logic’s team of experts, Tango decided to build on its solution by adopting Alert Logic Enterprise. This expanded capabilities beyond threat detection to also include AWS log management, web application firewall (WAF) and AWS vulnerability scanning among others.
The main driver behind Tango’s expansion of Alert Logic services was a risk-management review that looked for security gaps and risks. The expanded suite allowed Tango to improve its SOC 2 compliance as a SaaS provider as well as meet or exceed many customer security requirements. “It made it very easy for us to check the boxes and make sure we are covered without having to invest a whole lot in new personnel,” Thornton says.
The Results
Tango values Alert Logic as a partner with the expertise and tools to free up its own in-house resources to focus on the company’s core business. The development team can center its efforts on executing the code while Alert Logic takes care of monitoring, prioritizing and categorizing the massive volumes of cyber threats that target Tango’s site. The top priority for Tango is the confidence of knowing its customer data is safe.
What’s more, the cost of the Alert Logic solution is far lower than the cost of hiring and maintaining this type of expertise in-house. The partnership with Alert Logic has even become a selling point for Tango as it discusses its cybersecurity strengths with prospects and customers.Tango’s advice to other organizations facing similar cybersecurity challenges is this: Find a respected security-as-a-service partner that provides solid cybersecurity solutions, expertise, and advanced tools.
“Having this kind of a partner gives you comfort and confidence that you can relay to your customers that their data is secure, both during the sales cycle and over the course of ongoing support,” Thornton says. “These days, customers want a proven solution — and Alert Logic makes it easy to provide that comfort.”