Case Study
Bromium Provides Security for One
of the Largest Global Food Companies
Company Snapshot
INDUSTRY
Global food manufacturer
ENVIRONMENT
Approximately 20,000 employees
across the US and in strategic
international locations
SOLUTIONS
Bromium® vSentry®
Bromium LAVA™
CHALLENGES
•Phishing and spear phishing
•Malicious email attachments
•Infected documents on thumb drives
•Antivirus solution only 40%
effective, largely due to huge
volume of rapidly morphing threats
•Costly reimaging of mobile laptops
•High volume of security alerts for
IT to chase
•Urgent security patching for Java
BENEFITS
•Far surpasses the ability of antivirus
to detect unknown zero-day malware
and rapidly morphing threat variants
•Substantially improves protection
for mobile users who connect to PLC
systems and high-risk users who
handle sensitive data
•Minimizes the need for urgent
security patching on Java-based
business-critical applications
•Reduces spend on IT operational
expenses related to chasing false alerts,
reimaging, and security patching
Established in the mid-19th century and headquartered in
the Midwest, this packaged food manufacturer, the largest
in the US, makes products under popular brands found in 99%
of US grocery stores. The company employs approximately
20,000 people worldwide.
The challenge: spear phishing and
securing mobile and high-risk users
The information security manager,
who “lives and breathes” security,
was frustrated with solutions that try
to take a solely preventative approach.
He was looking for a new way to
protect endpoints because “… in the
end, most security products can’t
prevent anything.”
documents transferred from thumb
drives. In addition, their existing
antivirus solution was only 40%
effective. “Our antivirus product just
doesn’t cut it. Attackers can create 1,500
variations of a threat with a click of a
button—this isn’t in the data set of most
antivirus solutions. One in five pieces of
malware go undetected,” affirmed the
information security manager.
“The reason behind the security issues
we have today is 100% tied to the
software/hardware architecture—
the OS, applications, memory, and
file structures. In the Van Neuman
architecture, which is the foundation
of today’s computing, instructions and
data reside on the same platform, and
you can’t tell the difference. And that’s
the fundamental problem,” he said.
Another big concern was securing
mobile laptops used by engineering
support personnel who plugged
into systems used for industrial
automation at the company’s
numerous plants nationwide. As
the information security manager
pointed out, any manufacturing
downtime caused by malware could
be catastrophic for the company.
The security issues faced by the
food manufacturer were typical of
most large enterprises: phishing and
spear phishing exploits, malicious
attachments in emails, and infected
The information security manager
was also searching for a better way to
secure endpoints for high-risk users
who routinely share and work with
sensitive corporate data.
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Case Study
“Our antivirus product just
doesn’t cut it… One in five pieces
of malware go undetected.”
INFORMATION SECURITY MANAGER
GLOBAL FOOD MANUFACTURER
“Deploying Bromium on employee
systems has been totally seamless.
Users don’t even know it’s there.”
INFORMATION SECURITY MANAGER
GLOBAL FOOD MANUFACTURER
This user population includes human
resources, legal counsel, senior
leadership teams, and product teams
who focus on go-to-market strategies.
Bromium technology goes to the
heart of PC architecture
The information security manager had
been closely following Bromium since
2011. He felt that Bromium—with its
unique microvirtualization technology,
which works at the hardware level—
came closer than any other vendor
to addressing foundational concepts
about the innate nature of PCs and
their protocols.
“The common problem in security
is how to do trusted computing on
trusted hardware,” he said. “Bromium
is a very disruptive player in the
marketplace. Putting defenses in
hardware is another level of security
that is entirely different from software
in our security stack. Bromium
security is unique in that it goes to the
very foundation of PC architecture—
more so than any other product
available today.”
The problem with most current
security products, according to the
information security manager, is
this: “By adding more security in the
application layer on top of the OS,
you’re not solving the problem. The
nice thing about Bromium is that it
allows the bad code to execute in an
isolated container. Bromium provides
you with awareness and prevents
threats in a unique way. You’re
allowing execution of malware, but it
does not affect the operating system.”
The food manufacturer is deploying
3,000 Bromium vSentry and Bromium
LAVA seats over the course of the year.
The pilot rollout has been successful,
and the company plans to install
Bromium in high-risk environments
and all new computers issued to
users. “Deploying Bromium on
employee systems has been totally
seamless. Users don’t even know it’s
there,” commented the information
security manager.
Bromium lightens the load on
IT and cuts operational costs
In addition to defeating endpoint
threats much more effectively than
the company’s current antivirus
solution, the security information
manager feels confident that
Bromium will also positively impact IT
operations. He cites three areas where
Bromium can help lighten the burden
on IT and trim the associated costs:
reducing costly false alerts, limiting
urgent Java security patching, and
limiting the reimaging of infected PCs.
The food manufacturer has a slimmeddown staff of five highly trained
security incident responders, each
of whom spend 40 hours per week
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Case Study
To learn more about Bromium’s
game-changing security architecture,
please visit www.bromium.com.
monitoring and investigating alerts.
On an average day, the security team
sees 624 endpoint alerts. The security
information manager is convinced that
the Bromium deployment will result in
a reduction in the number of events,
especially false positives, and will
allow these team members to spend
more of their valuable time analyzing
and remediating real events.
The information security manager
also sees a clear opportunity for
Bromium to reduce urgent security
patches. Typically, six Microsoft
patches are rolled out per month
on Patch Tuesdays, and patches
for commonly used applications—
Adobe Reader, and Flash Player, as
well as Java—are rolled out as they
come in. “About 90% of threats use
Java vulnerabilities and many of our
business applications are based on
Java, so it’s a critical issue for us.
Bromium can help us manage multiple
Java versions that our applications
need, and that’s a huge win,” he said.
Bromium US
20813 Stevens Creek Blvd
Cupertino, CA 95014
[email protected]
+1.408.213.5668
Bromium UK
Lockton House
2nd Floor, Clarendon Road
Cambridge CB2 8FH
+44.1223.314914
On average, five to six PCs per week
require reimaging. (Forrester Consulting
estimates that the average cost for
reimaging is as much as $400 per
endpoint.) For this company, reimaging
PCs after threats do their damage is
challenging because budgets are
tight and many of the company’s 140
plants don’t have IT personnel on site,
which means technicians often have
to drive long distances to remediate
end-user systems.
A more secure future with Bromium
Looking to the future, the information
security manager sees a place for
Bromium in securing systems that
need to be assimilated into the
company through acquisitions. He also
foresees a day when virtual machines
will become commonplace at his
company and expects that Bromium
will easily adapt to that environment.
“It may sound like a tall order, but I
expect that, over time, Bromium will
allow us to eliminate several of our
security tools,” he said.
For more information refer to www.bromium.com,
contact [email protected] or call at 1-800-518-0845
Copyright ©2014 Bromium, Inc. All rights reserved.
CS.AnonFoodMfr.US-EN.1406
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