Melbourne Racing Club introduces 24/7 SOC and incident response support to bolster cyber security

Objective

With cybercrime increasing in frequency and complexity, Melbourne Racing Club sought a security partner to help improve visibility for vital round the clock support, to support its IT team.

Melbourne Racing Club reached out to trusted partners including Data#3 to request proposed solutions. A proof of concept showed that the solution and joint expertise Data#3 and SecurityHQ offered was a great fit to meet their requirements.

IT Outcome

• Increased visibility of security threats 24/7/365
• Cyber security expertise and incident response available round the clock
• Intelligent security analytics deployed
• Contextually based alerts with removal of false positive and noise

Business Outcome

• Upskilled IT team supported by 400+ security specialists worldwide
• Reduced risk and greater insight into the Melbourne Racing Club environment
• As a service model with predictable costs
• Tangible, documented steps taken to protect clients, partners and suppliers

The Background

Melbourne Racing Club (MRC) offers a world-class visitor experience to its sporting, entertainment and hotel venues. Formed in 1875, the organisation’s history plays a central role in Australia’s cultural heritage.

The organisation has a busy ICT team that primarily operates during business hours, supporting the business as well as partners using the network at its venues. A modern cyber security solution was needed to aid the ICT team in protecting against evolving risks.

The Challenge

With many high-profile organisations getting hit by cyberattacks, MRC was acutely aware that every organisation must tackle this growing risk. To do so it would take the right mix of people, process and technology, and would require 24/7 resources. MRC General Manager – Technology, VJ Borgohain, said that monitoring and addressing cyber incidents involved considerable manual effort and was performed in-house.

“We had almost all of our detection and response service in-house, using different platforms and software that monitored our environment. It was up to the infrastructure team to look at that and take actions. The issue was that we all wear multiple hats; we are not dedicated security consultants, we knew we needed a partner with the expertise to monitor what comes in almost in real-time,” said Borgohain.

“We work at specific times, not 24/7. Outside of business hours, we lacked the coverage needed to respond quickly.”

The tasks involved in evaluating risk were increasingly time-consuming, and staff had to balance working through a volume of alerts with other priorities. Their skills were in demand to provide ICT expertise for the many events and activities that MRC hosts, ranging from sports events to conferences and charitable endeavours with the MRC Foundation.

“We knew we really needed some help, and reached out to several partners including Data^#3, who took us through their managed SOC offering in partnership with SecurityHQ. We really liked what Data^#3 and SecurityHQ offers in terms of 24/7 access to 400+ security consultants at SOC operations centres all over the world. This combined with the expertise of the Data^#3 team meant we knew our environment would be monitored 24/7 and that we could respond to incidents quickly,” explained Borgohain.

While the solution met MRC’s requirements, including onshore data storage, on paper, Borgohain was keen to take a closer look at how it would work in the real world. Data^#3 and SecurityHQ organised a proof of concept (POC) so they could try the managed SOC solution and consulting proposal for themselves. The speed of the Data^#3 and SecurityHQ partnership was quickly put to the test.

Conclusion

In a fast-evolving security landscape, Borgohain was clear that technical solutions alone are only part of the story. He said it is vital to have the right people and processes in place to continually adjust and improve security posture.

“We get that accountability from Data^#3 and SecurityHQ that saves us from constantly worrying if we are doing enough, as we used to feel when we were doing this in-house. Some weeks, my team is especially busy with different big events, provisioning technology for our customers, and now we have peace of mind knowing that our security monitoring is being taken care of.”