Based in San Francisco, ServiceSource is a 2,500-employee revenue lifecycle company that provides outsourced customer adoption, expansion, and renewal services for subscription-based businesses. Kip James is the company’s Chief Information Security Officer and Data Privacy Officer, with 34 years of experience in information technology and 24 years in information security.
Challenge
Like thousands of companies that migrated to the cloud over the past few years, ServiceSource uses a variety of cloud storage resources and SaaS applications, ranging from Box to Google Drive, Gmail, Office 365, Microsoft Office OneDrive, and Salesforce. In addition, as a public company with many compliance requirements, ServiceSource has long used best-of-breed security products to secure information in its data center with antivirus, malware sandboxing, malware protection, and data leakage prevention. Following ServiceSource's recent cloud migration, however, James quickly discovered the limitations of his data center security products in protecting information in the cloud.
Solution
Always on the hunt for the latest security innovations for ServiceSource, James discovered Avanan in early 2016 at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. Among more than 500 vendors exhibiting at RSA, Avanan was one of just two that caught James’ attention.
“I needed a way to apply the same levels of security to my cloud infrastructure as I am in my data center,” said James. “Avanan is the first product that allows you to manage across multiple security products, and really understand the security status of all my information in the cloud. There’s nothing else out there that can provide that capability.”
Results
After receiving a brief web demo and introductory overview, James had Avanan installed in less than an hour.
“I could immediately see the status of all my cloud information—who was sharing what with whom—and events across all security products, SaaS applications, and cloud storage. We now have the ability to truly provide data loss prevention with alerts that tell me if there were ever any attempts to share sensitive information outside the organization.”
One-click PoC
In addition to these benefits, James loves Avanan’s ability to let him try new security products with a simple mouse click in the Avanan Cloud Security Platform.
“On the first day, I turned on everything in Avanan just to see what it would do–antivirus, malware sandboxing, DLP, anomaly detection, you name it.” James said. “When they added Cylance a few weeks later, I was able to try it immediately on all my files. I love the product. It gives me incredible visibility into our data, who’s using it, and the risks associated with it. It helps us more effectively enforce our security policies across all of our products and cloud information, and it saves a ton of time and effort as well.”
When asked what he would tell someone considering Avanan for cloud security, James replied that it’s "an absolute necessity," adding, “If you don’t use Avanan, you’re not doing what you should as a CISO in protecting information.”
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Bio
Toole has over 25 years of leadership experience in B2B, B2G, and B2C marketing, primarily for early stage, high tech startups. Throughout his career, Toole has held executive level marketing positions with numerous emerging technology firms marketing to the public and private sectors, including Content Analyst Company (acquired by kCura), AppAssure (acquired by Dell), Jobfox (founded by CareerBuilder’s founder and former CEO), immixGroup (acquired by Arrow), INPUT (acquired by Deltek), iCode (renamed as Everest), Precise Software, W. Quinn, and AXENT Technologies (all Symantec acquisitions).
