Pact Group: Minimising security costs while getting more from their platforms
Learn how Pact Group was able to improve agility while minimising security costs with Interactive's Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) and Managed Azure Sentinel.
Pact Group Holdings
Pact Group (Pact) is one of the largest manufacturers of rigid plastics packaging in Australia and New Zealand with a growing footprint in Asia. ASX listed, Pact’s vision is to lead the circular economy through packaging, reuse and recycling solutions.
Pact’s Packaging Division adopts a whole of product lifecycle approach to sustainable packaging solutions. Partnering with global brands to local dairy producers, the Group integrates supply chain efficiencies and sustainable practices into the design and manufacturing process. Pact’s Reuse Division eliminates single-use through reuse solutions. This is to ensure vital resources can be swiftly collected, sorted, cleaned and redistributed or repurposed at scale. Pact’s Recycling Division reduces waste through recycling solutions. To deliver this at scale, Pact partners with Government bodies, industry groups and customers to continually expand its post-consumer waste recycling capabilities and feed the Group’s packaging division.
Pact has grown significantly since inception in 2002. This growth is the result of Pact’s strategy of acquiring well-established packaging businesses throughout Australia, New Zealand and Asia, combined with organic growth, a solid focus on integration, investing in improved business/operating systems, automated manufacturing, people and innovative products and processes.
Key benefits
- Advanced SIEM product
- Improved detection and response capabilities
- Fully integrated with Microsoft stack
- Reduced duplication of effort
Technology advancements means security requirements
As part of Pact’s mission to become a more sustainable company, both in terms of operations and the packaging it produces, technology becomes more interwoven into every piece of their global footprint.
This created a need to develop a security platform that could scale with and protect this growth, supported by an expert partner with an understanding of the business. The key risk to emerge for a networked manufacturer lies in the connectivity of the plant and equipment, creating a huge exposure with significant potential consequences.
Pact began the search with Proof of Concept on the suitability of the Microsoft Sentinel SIEM product to perform as the core of a SIEMaaS as solution, finding the natural integration with Azure to be a deciding factor. With the technology choice firming up, Pact took a detailed technical tender to market in a quest to find a security partner to help them deliver an ambitious set of outcomes:
Lowering risk in two steps
Interactive’s successful proposal was built on two main components; the cloud-native SIEM platform in the form of Azure Sentinel and the monitoring and management capabilities of Interactive’s Australian-based CSOC.
The first stage involved the deployment of Azure Sentinel into the Pact environment, connecting the myriad of different data connectors and ensuring all of Pact’s services were supplying accurate security feeds. Interactive were able to draw on specific IP to allow for faster risk assessment and configuration, delivering an improved monitoring result very quickly.
Interactive made sure to understand what’s important to Pact, not just in terms of technical security requirements, but in terms of how they operate their business, where critical assets are located, how stores of personally identifiable information and operational sensitivity are handled.
This allowed Interactive to tailor threat detections to better suit the risk levels of different aspects of Pact’s business.
Crucial to the success of the solution is Interactive’s security operations capability (CSOC), which monitors the alerts emanating from the Sentinel platform, on a 24/7 basis. Interactive’s team of security experts investigates and triages those alerts based on priority levels as they relate to Pact’s business. After refining the alerts to the most critical instances, the team then package the alert with a summary, explanation and targeted recommended actions. Harnessing the power of AI and machine learning, backed by the ongoing maturation of the Sentinel platform, Interactive can establish a feedback loop with Pact to ensure constant performance improvement, both in terms of speed and accuracy.
Getting more from solutions
Pact’s business may be unique, but the operational challenges presented by their security infrastructure are shared by many businesses who have executed digital transformation: increasing costs with decreasing rates of utilisation. Interactive were not only able to help Pact improve the confidence they have in their level of risk management, but also to extract far more value from the technology at their disposal.
In Pact’s case, Interactive were able to further tune and mature the tools and take advantage of the ongoing improvements delivered by Microsoft’s almost billion-dollars-a-year investment in their security practice. As more functionality becomes available in the tools and platform that Pact has licensed, Interactive continues to help them get the most value from these improvements, the moment they come to market.
Pact’s rapid growth also revealed more value in the partnership with Interactive when the acquisition of another firm in a foreign market sparked a flurry of alerts once the acquired system was ‘plugged in’ to the company’s network. Interactive were quickly able to respond to potential risks generated by unwanted applications and possible malware, performing clean-up and gaining visibility of the new merged environment from day one.
It’s this level of proactive security management and support that gives Pact’s management confidence to continue to grow and acquire businesses quickly, knowing they have the capability to detect and mitigate the risk inherent in that type of operation.
