Note: This blog is a summary of a recent installment of our webinar series, “Secure Smarter, Not Harder.”
Supply-Chain Attacks: A Growing Threat
The spate of recent attacks aimed at disrupting the supply chain serves as a wakeup call to the security community. It is not just about protecting enterprise assets anymore, but resiliency—the ability to safely enable and function despite these attacks.
That’s easier said than done of course, so, how do you do it? While there is no silver bullet, we recently sat down with Joe Howard Bennett Jr., Adient VP and CISO (Chief Information Security Officer), and Nate Fergusson, Senior IT Security Analyst from Adient, to discuss how they manage their operations in this increasingly nefarious environment and build resilience.
How Adient Drives Resiliency
Adient is a leading global automotive seating supplier, supporting all major automakers in differentiating their vehicles through superior quality, technology, and performance. Formerly known as Johnson Controls Automotive Experience, with approximately 77,000 employees operating in 202 manufacturing and assembly plants in 32 countries worldwide, they produce and deliver automotive seating for all vehicle classes and all major OEMs—more than 19 million cars per year. Now that’s a global supply chain!
Joe and Nate stressed the importance of close collaboration between the executive and operations teams. But like most other security teams, budgets are tight, as are resources. This led Adient to turn to ReliaQuest services and the GreyMatter platform to force-multiply their existing team.
As Joe and Nate explain, ReliaQuest has enabled Adient’s security team to do more with less. Because GreyMatter cuts through the noise and escalates only the most important alerts to Adient, their analysts have been able to focus on higher priority items. ReliaQuest also helps them further tune their environment to get even more efficient. As a result of the partnership, Adient estimates they are seeing 72% efficiency gains in endpoint protection.
Adient + ReliaQuest = More Visibility and Happier Analysts
With such a diverse environment to manage, Joe believes Adient can never have enough eyes and ears. And that is one way his team finds ReliaQuest’s GreyMatter platform valuable. Through GreyMatter, they are not only able to get the visibility they need (“It is not the ticket count but the volume of alerts,” believes Joe) across their environment but also a single place to collaborate, investigate, and act.
The end result? The quality of analysts’ time has significantly increased, and they are much happier—which speaks to morale, productivity, and retention.
In an industry where shiny objects can be distracting, Joe strongly believes in focusing on core controls. He says he still uses a lot from 25 years ago since they are still very relevant. His emphasis: get fundamental controls in place and monitor them. He is also a big proponent of automation and finds it great for a tried, repeatable, manual process. But he cautions that if you try to come up with a new process and automate it without trying it out first, it will mostly likely fail.
With a global supply chain, Joe and team have to be on guard. And ReliaQuest is a proud partner to help them deliver on their promise of resilience.