Global Financial Org Evaluates Cybersecurity Solutions, Optimizes Cloud Investments
In this case study
Challenges
One of the largest banking and financial enterprises in the world wanted to understand if it should renew its contract with cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike or adopt a competing endpoint detection and recovery (EDR) solution.
At the same time, the firm was seeking innovative ways to unlock cost savings in the face of ongoing budget challenges.
In partnership with AWS, we identified an opportunity to leverage AWS Cloud Marketplace to optimize how the firm consumed and procured cloud software. While the firm had some prior experience with AWS Cloud Marketplace, it had not fully explored how cloud marketplaces could enable more cost-effective procurement decisions across technology domains.
Solutions
EDR proof of concept
The firm engaged us to run a proof of concept (POC) in our Malware Test Lab, which we built in our Advanced Technology Center (ATC) to help organizations easily compare endpoint security solutions. These popular engagements pair infrastructure from the ATC's pre-built IT environments with the client's choice of hardware and software from strategic original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) like CrowdStrike.
Each POC environment is custom built to mirror the testing organization's existing IT footprint, meaning clients can significantly expedite technology comparisons to determine which course of investment best aligns with their business and security objectives.
After establishing the EDR comparison environment in the ATC, our security and network engineers systematically tested CrowdStrike's Falcon Platform against two separate EDR solutions selected by the client. We ran a battery of tests across custom feature sets for both products based on client requirements and industry best practices.
AWS Cloud Marketplace CPPO
Closely following the POC, WWT's Cloud Marketplace team assessed the firm's existing public cloud consumption commit to identify opportunities to optimize its approach to cloud software lifecycle management and IT modernization.
Our Cloud Marketplace experts apply cloud-optimization and automation best practices across complex cloud environments, helping clients capitalize on the benefits of their unique cloud architecture across procurement, strategy development, and capacity management planning and monitoring teams. In fact, our experts understand cloud marketplaces so well that the major cloud hyperscalers have all engaged WWT for guidance on how to optimize and grow their own cloud marketplaces.
Upon review of the client's cloud commit, we noticed the subscription management model could be optimized by leveraging an AWS Consulting Partner Private Offer (CPPO). Partners like WWT use CPPOs to offer clients unique pricing, customized payment schedules and license terms, and additional services — all backed by extensive industry experience, reach back to engineering resources across technology domains, plus consulting expertise across all public cloud service providers.
In adopting this new route to AWS Cloud Marketplace, the client asked our marketplace experts to help it retire its existing public cloud commitments and manage the CPPO going forward.
Outcomes
The global financial organization has been thrilled with WWT's partnership for many reasons:
EDR proof of concept success
First, our CrowdStrike POC gave the client confidence to renew its contract for roughly 600,000 desktops, including room to expand cloud licensing in the coming years. The client's self-assurance in its decision can be attributed to the comprehensive nature of the testing available in our Malware Test Lab as well as our long-term relationships with CrowdStrike, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other vendors who operate in the competitive security and cloud landscapes.
As part of the engagement, the client also ended up hiring a WWT Network Segmentation engineer from our Strategic Resourcing bench to help integrate and update various cybersecurity investments.
The client now considers WWT to be a trusted partner in the security domain and is currently evaluating additional security solutions in our ATC.
Cloud marketplace success
Second, the newly adopted CPPO model has empowered our Cloud Marketplace experts to help manage the client's ongoing relationship with AWS Cloud Marketplace. Not only will streamlining the cloud software lifecycle help ensure cloud spend remains right sized in coming years, but it will save the client money by giving it access to a more favorable discount tier.
Diversity spend success
Finally, the client was pleased to leverage WWT's status as an award-winning minority-owned business to contribute to its mission of joining the ranks of The Billion Dollar Roundtable, a prestigious association of businesses that spend at least $1B annually with minority and women-owned suppliers.
Maintaining a diverse supply chain was a strategic focus for the client, making its partnership with WWT (one of a few MBEs operating in the cloud marketplace space) that much more valuable.
What's next?
Private cloud marketplace
This dual cybersecurity and cloud marketplace engagement has enabled the financial firm to set its sights on additional process improvements in the near future. For example, WWT has been tasked with helping the client further consolidate its global software spend by shifting its reliance on hundreds of regional resellers to a handful of globally capable value-added partners.
To achieve that goal, our Cloud Marketplace team plans to build a private cloud marketplace for the firm. This private marketplace will feature a custom interface built to meet the client's internal policies and requirements, enabling IT and procurement teams to create custom catalogues of software for specific groups of end users.
There are several benefits to this approach. First, the client will gain the control needed to ensure only approved reseller software and digitized products become available to end users. This can reduce the risk of unauthorized software purchases across the global organization.
Second, a private cloud marketplace can help procurement and IT better customize the user experience while streamlining the software approval process via a single-pane-of-glass dashboard view of consolidated requests. Employees will be able to leverage the private marketplace to discover and deploy pre-approved software faster.
Finally, this approach will enable WWT experts to further advise procurement on the ideal avenue for prospective software purchases, making it that much easier for the global financial firm to lock in the best pricing and meet its diversity spend goals.