Daymark Solutions Secures Its Microsoft Azure Cloud

Daymark architects and implements complex data center solutions providing deep technical knowledge, extensive experience, and proven methodologies to help clients make educated decisions, streamline the acquisition process, and successfully implement cost-effective solutions and service. Daymark challenges itself to continuously understand customers’ changing needs and to meet them with the right technologies. As its customers wanted to embrace cloud services with advanced security, Daymark searched for a solution that could address the security challenges of migrating workloads to the cloud.

Securing Cloud Applications and Workloads

 Daymark’s business customers have begun their journeys to the cloud in order to achieve specific objectives—reduce infrastructure footprint and associated CAPEX costs, simplify management, accelerate service delivery or improve application performance. Daymark had chosen Microsoft Azure as its cloud delivery platform because it met the broadest range of customer requirements, was enterprise-ready and easy to use. About the same time, Daymark was refreshing its core infrastructure platforms so it made sense that the company also adopt the cloud that it advises customers to use. Daymark began moving core assets into Microsoft Azure as well.

“We work closely with customers to help them avoid unforeseen issues while deploying complex IT solutions,” said Corey Roberts, Director of Technology at Daymark. “As we moved our environment and helped customers deploy workloads in Azure, we knew that security was a critical capability and challenge. We began looking for a solution.”

Visibility and Protection Inside The Cloud

Daymark’s intellectual property—its documentation and processes—are critical assets. The company needed to protect these assets together with customers’ cloud data. Protecting the perimeter with advanced threat prevention, data leak prevention and intrusion prevention was essential. Customers also were experiencing malware and ransomware in their cloud environments. At the same time, the Daymark team needed much better visibility into the Azure environment for troubleshooting, forensics and reporting purposes. Specifically, they couldn’t see traffic that the firewall blocked or captured at the network perimeter or inside the cloud.

“We began looking at next-generation firewalls on the market,” Roberts said. “We wanted a solution that could inspect at Layers 4 through 7, deliver in-depth analytics, and prevent threats—not just detect them. It had to work with Azure, and it had to protect customers’ highly detailed, micro-segmented workloads.”

Comprehensive Cloud Security with Ease of Deployment

 The Daymark team conducted extensive evaluations of next-generation firewall solutions and identified Check Point as an industry leader. After testing several solutions in the lab, the team was impressed by Check Point’s ease of use and superb visibility. They chose CloudGuard Network Security for Microsoft Azure for both on-premises and cloud environments.

The Check Point CloudGuard Network Security solution extends security to the Azure cloud infrastructure with a full range of protections offered by the Check Point Threat Prevention Security architecture including anti-malware, zero-day protection using sandboxing technology. CloudGuard Network Security for Microsoft Azure prevents network attacks and data breaches while enabling secure connectivity to Azure environments. The deployment of Check Point CloudGuard Network Security was straightforward for the team. They deployed CloudGuard Network Securityin Daymark office locations and connected them together in the Azure environment.

“During deployment, we contacted Check Point support for guidance and they were amazing,” said Roberts. “They understood the deployment from both the Microsoft and Check Point perspectives. We just dropped the license keys into our Check Point portal, rolled out the appliances, and were up and running within a day.”

Threat Prevention with Visibility

 Roberts says that the CloudGuard Network Security solution has increased the team’s visibility into threats by 100 percent. They were literally amazed to identify the thousands of threats and bad actors trying to penetrate the company’s perimeter defenses, both on premises and in Azure cloud. Check Point detects threats, prevents them from entering, and alerts the team about each occurrence.

Giving Customers More Flexibility and Agility

 Daymark customers can also deploy Check Point CloudGuard Network Security in their production environments. When they clone environments for development, quality assurance, testing, or other purposes, the Check Point management server’s leverage RESTful API’s to automatically deploy and configure new CloudGuard Network Security appliances for each environment.

“Cloud enables customers to expand their data centers in new ways,” said Roberts. “Check Point easily spans multiple cloud offerings and on-premises micro-segmentation. These software-defined networking capabilities are powerful, and give customers the flexibility they want with the security they need.”

The Check Point CloudGuard Network Security solution also works well with Daymark’s other partners, such as Cisco ACI, VMware NSX, and Microsoft. A single pane of glass for security solutions allows the team to see across their entire environment and consistently apply the right level of security protections—whether on premises or in the cloud.

Critical Component: Check Point Security

“We thoroughly test and use everything new internally, before we take it to customers,” said Roberts.

“Having data leak prevention, intrusion protection, all the advanced zero-day protection services running on our perimeter with Check Point was critical. Check Point has proven to be a very critical component of our environment.”