NCR accelerates towards zero-trust with Cisco ACI and AlgoSec – Cisco Blogs
This blog is a joint collaboration between Ravi Balakrishnan (Cisco) and Tanya Mackenzie (AlgoSec).
NCR Corporation is a leading global point-of-sale (POS) provider for restaurants, retailers, and banks and a provider of multi-vendor ATM software. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, NCR has over 36,000 employees in 160 countries, and solutions are distributed in 141 countries.
The Challenges
NCR was undergoing a modernization of their network to move into the cloud, micro-segmentation, and container security.
They were challenged with connecting its DevOps pipeline with its network security. With over 4500 policy changes made annually, it was difficult to securely manage their entire networking and security environment while being responsive to application owners but still achieve zero trust.
Strategically, they were aiming to automate and orchestrate security policy changes across their entire hybrid network, so they could securely accelerate application delivery.
How Algosec and Cisco ACI helped address the challenges
Their on-premises data center was migrated to Cisco ACI as the core infrastructure of the modernization project. The AlgoSec Security Management Suite is a strategic component of NCR’s network security, managing its entire network security infrastructure.
The AlgoSec Management Suite allowed NCR to:
- Auto discover and map business applications, providing full visibility into their network applications across the hybrid estate.
- Automate the entire security policy change process from design and submission to proactive risk analysis, implementation, validation, and auditing.
- Make changes at the business application level, including during application migrations, server deployment, and decommissioning projects.
Solution components
AlgoSec Security Policy Management Suite, Cisco ACI
Benefits/Results
AlgoSec is a strategic component of NCR’s network security, managing its entire network security infrastructure.
The AlgoSec platform enables the NCR Corporation to manage application connectivity end-to-end across their network — including public cloud, Cisco ACI and physical firewalls. “Most products don’t understand the end-to-end environment. AlgoSec does,” noted Scott Theriault, Global Manager, Network Perimeter Security.
Some of the ways that NCR Corporation benefits from AlgoSec include:
- Launched migration of their on-premises data centers into the Cisco ACI fabric.
- Extended micro segmentation to Cisco ACI.
- Achieved complete visibility of their global security posture from a single dashboard.
- Automated risk analysis, achieving visibility and insights into the risk that changes introduce.
- Streamlined auditing process with to automatic logging and audit-ready compliance reports.
- Cleaned up and reduced firewall policies with rule cleanup, object cleanup, and policy tuning
As we aspire to achieve zero-trust, when moving into the cloud, micro-segmentation and
container security come into play. Therefore, we need tools like AlgoSec to assist us in the
journey because most application owners don’t know what access is needed.This tool helps them learn what needs to be implemented to reduce the attack surface.
—Scott Theriault, Global Manager, Network Perimeter Security
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