Open House Group Enhances Security and Efficiency

“All communications are visualized on a process-by-process basis,” says Arai, referring to the most significant effect of implementing Akamai Guardicore Segmentation. “Whereas we used to depend on individual personnel in order to understand how our systems shared information with others, this tool now allows other staff members to understand this in a visual manner,” he explains.

Open House Group has also achieved significant improvements in the efficiency of forensic investigations that previously took a lot of time. “With its intuitive GUI operation, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation allows us to find the logs required for our decisions and view them on a per-process basis. Investigations can be easily conducted by narrowing down the search by source, port, time zone, etc.,” Ikeda explains.

“This helps us to detect communications with undesirable IPs and deal with them on a daily basis,” adds Arai. In particular, it allowed the company to resolve an issue with the membership registration page of their property purchase site. When sending automatic emails based on the email address entered during registration, the DNS security function blocks communication to suspicious domains in advance, preventing accidental connections to mail servers that may belong to attackers. This prevents sales activities from unintentionally sending emails to suspicious servers, leading to a significant reduction in security risks.

The lack of consideration on the operations side has been greatly improved by the fact that communications can now be understood visually. In addition, the “Hits” item in the list of policy rules helps to address misconfigurations and security holes. It indicates the number of times that communications matching those rules have occurred. If it’s zero, it can be determined as unnecessary, so deleting it can close a security hole.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation also contributes to their ongoing Zero Trust initiative. The logs can be output in CSV format, allowing users to examine the IP ranges and ports of communications and set strict rules to allow only those internal communications that are really necessary. In addition, microsegmentation’s per-process control makes it possible to place a “gate number” on the server.

The implementation of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation improved security, but it also provided other unexpected benefits.

“When moving from on-premises to the cloud, we stop the old environment’s servers and check the status of our communications to ensure there are no issues, and now we can do this more easily with communication visualization. Also, thanks to the intuitive method of checking the map and seeing that regions are not linked if there are no communication arrows showing, we can now see at a glance which devices are not connected to the ServiceNow or Zabbix services we are using,” explains Ikeda.

Ikeda values Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, describing it as a “last line of defense” and adding that “it’s a staunch ally that not only enhances security but also streamlines our daily tasks.” As for the future, he says, “We are currently only controlling inbound traffic, but going forward we also want to implement process-specific and outbound traffic controls to block any unnecessary gaps.” 

Arai goes on to describe it as a “final barrier,” with everyone agreeing that Akamai Guardicore Segmentation brings value.

“The first barrier is the data center firewall, the second barrier is the EDR, and the final barrier is the Akamai Guardicore Segmentation microsegmentation solution. We intend to robustly defend against external and internal threats using these three barriers,” says Arai.

“We are determined to continually strengthen our security going forward by being proactive in the threat hunting field and staying ahead of attackers through our partnership with Akamai,” Arai adds.