Axway Secures Cloud Services

“As we continued to increase our technology and grow our customer base, it became very apparent that moving away from the current auditing processes in place would be necessary if we were going to sustain the high level of customer support we expect ourselves to provide,” Danielson says. Not only did the vulnerability management tools Axway had been using fail to scale, they also foundered when it came to automation and accuracy, or the ability to assess a highly-virtualized cloud environment.

That meant Axway needed to find a more efficient and effective way to conduct the risk and vulnerability assessment necessary for its successful cloud services business to continue to prosper. “We wanted to move to improve our preventive controls, and be able to demonstrate our mature risk management program—and vulnerability management is a critical part of that,” says Danielson. “We wanted something that was easy to use and would work with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The ability to work well in that cloud environment was crucial.”

During Axway’s evaluation of vulnerability management alternatives, only one option truly stood out. Qualys Vulnerability Management (VM), a part of the Enterprise TruRisk Platform, was the only choice Axway evaluated that met all of its criteria, including the Qualys Virtual Scanner Appliance, which extends the reach of the Enterprise TruRisk Platform into the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In traditional and virtual infrastructures, Qualys VM automates the life cycle of network auditing and vulnerability management, including network discovery and mapping, asset prioritization, vulnerability assessment reporting, and remediation tracking according to business risk. And with the most comprehensive vulnerability KnowledgeBase available, Qualys VM protects systems against the latest security threats without substantial cost, resource, and deployment burdens.

Decreasing risk, increasing transparency

By continuously and proactively monitoring network access points, Qualys VM and the Virtual Scanner Appliance help Danielson and his team to reduce the time it takes to research, scan, and fix network exposures. This improves Axway’s regulatory compliance and IT risk management efforts, as network vulnerabilities are eliminated before they can be exploited. “Qualys is so easy to deploy compared to its competitors. It just seemed to work in our environment. It’s proven to be very powerful and cost effective,” Danielson says.

“The fact that the Qualys Virtual Scanner Appliance worked so smoothly within AWS enabled us to just scan and move forward. No one else came close in the ease with which they worked with AWS. And even the competitors that did have a virtual machine, which most did not, provided only a very generic approach compared to Qualys,” he says.

The initial scans went extraordinarily well, explains Danielson. “We were very quickly conducting our first few assessments with Qualys. Qualys proved itself accurate, very easy to use, and non-disruptive to our systems. This wasn’t a surprise, as we did a lot of testing and due diligence before selecting Qualys,” he says.

QualysGuard® Cloud Platform

In the coming weeks, Axway will be deploying the Qualys connector for use with AWS. The Qualys connector provides the automated discovery and tracking of AWS-hosted assets through its ability to detect and synchronize changes to virtual machine instance inventories. The instances can then be tracked over time, even as their IP addresses change, and are scanned for vulnerabilities using Qualys Virtual Scanner Appliances deployed on Amazon EC2 or Amazon VPC.

Qualys also helps Axway’s IT teams to streamline their answers to IT regulatory audit requests. “If the auditors have a question about a compliance function, we can provide them with our Qualys reports. That eliminates a lot of the questions that we’d otherwise have to answer through manual investigations. And that reduces a lot of stress for us,” he says.

“We were very quickly conducting our first few assessments with Qualys. Qualys proved itself accurate, very easy to use, and non-disruptive to our systems. This wasn’t a surprise, as we did a lot of testing and due diligence before selecting Qualys.”

Josh Danielson

Senior Security Implementation Manager, Axway

Qualys also has increased the visibility that Axway has into the health of its IT systems. “We are able to demonstrate the maturity of our risk management efforts,” says Danielson. “The data Qualys provides gives us valuable insights that we can share with everyone throughout the organization. The data from Qualys is straightforward, including actual scans, results, and true risks. It gives us the clout we need to obtain the support and visibility for our other security initiatives to help lower our overall risk,” he says.

Initially, Axway needed a way to streamline its security processes to more effectively and securely grow its cloud services, and ensure that its systems are maintained to the level of security and regulatory compliance that customers need and demand. “It’s been a true success, and I’m looking forward to continuing to use Qualys as we grow and scale our cloud services,” says Danielson.