A vision for consistent security and connectivity, everywhere
As the leader of a global company with manufacturing facilities and offices spread across hundreds of locations, Colgate-Palmolive CISO Alexander Schuchman needed to raise the standard. The team set out to:
- Secure operational technologies (OT) at manufacturing locations the same as IT within offices.
- Enhance performance for critical applications across manufacturing and business sites.
- Provide visibility and consistent security to support employees working from anywhere.
- Improve the efficiency and efficacy of the Security Operations Center.
- Drive greater collaboration between teams and eliminate redundant solutions.
“We turned to Palo Alto Networks, because honestly, we couldn’t afford not to. We needed a best-in-class security program to defend the company.”
– Alexander Schuchman
CISO, Colgate-Palmolive Company
Path to Platformization
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IT and OT
Network security drives consistency -
Integrated SASE
Improves productivity and security efficacy -
SOC automation
Enables greater efficiency -
Unified platforms
reduce complexity and increase collaboration.
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IT and OT network security drives consistency
Colgate-Palmolive’s journey to improve its security posture started with a move to unify network security across all locations. The company selected Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls for its data center, worldwide manufacturing plants and large campus business sites, consolidating legacy firewall and web proxy solutions. This enabled Colgate-Palmolive to drive a consistent posture by leveraging the same security for both IT and OT environments. It also adopted Cloud-Delivered Security Services to apply additional security treatment on network traffic. Subscriptions like Advanced Threat Prevention, Advanced URL Filtering and WildFire allow Colgate-Palmolive to leverage the latest threat intel and stop attacks in real time.
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Integrated SASE improves productivity and security efficacy
As Colgate-Palmolive continued to grow and evolve, it needed a better solution to connect and secure its employees wherever they work. Building on the protection from its Next-Generation Firewalls, the company adopted Prisma SD-WAN and Prisma Access to form an integrated SASE architecture.
Together, Prisma SASE gives Colgate-Palmolive end-to-end visibility over their network traffic and an ease of troubleshooting. The solution has enhanced resilience for up to 900 unique applications across factory and business sites by autonomously identifying and avoiding performance issues. In particular, their main collaboration tool in Google Meet has significantly improved to keep their teams as productive as possible. In addition, Prisma Access blocks over 200,000 unique threats on average per month, ensuring that employees and devices are secure regardless of if they're at home, on the go or in a remote site.
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SOC automation enables greater efficiency
Another area of focus was to modernize the Colgate-Palmolive Security Operations Center (SOC). Previously, the SOC team relied on a manual approach to threat investigations with a confusing mix of six different communication methods between spreadsheets, phone calls, emails, ticketing systems, and other siloed tooling. Adopting Cortex XSOAR has allowed SOC analysts to use a single platform as their source of truth for all incident management efforts, leveraging the solution's playbooks with built-in automations to jumpstart investigations and accelerate response times.
Unified platforms reduce complexity and increase collaboration
Before Colgate-Palmolive began modernizing its approach to networking and security, teams relied on a variety of tools to manage day-to-day operations. Changes to security policies required team members to switch between multiple consoles. The Network Security Platform from Palo Alto Networks extends the same policies and security services from the Next-Generation Firewalls to Prisma Access, which can all be managed from a centralized interface in Strata Cloud Manager for comprehensive visibility across all users and locations. By automating incident investigation and consolidating workflows with Cortex XSOAR, the SOC can remain aligned as a team and focus their efforts on the highest priority cases.
Having all of these solutions delivered through the same vendor was a huge bonus for Schuchman, who shares, “The value proposition of the overall platform play was much more beneficial and much easier to manage from an operational perspective.” The approach has dramatically reduced complexity and increased collaboration between security and networking teams as Colgate-Palmolive seeks to lead the manufacturing industry in security best practices.
"I sleep better at night knowing that Palo Alto Networks is there to support our organization. Whether it’s our Security Operations Center, our network or our connections to the internet, we know Palo Alto Networks solutions are there to protect us.”
– Alexander Schuchman
CISO Colgate-Palmolive Company