Customer Success Story The Linux Foundation Solves Growing Identity, Application, and Security Management Challenges with Zilla Security
The Challenges
The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing open-source projects like Kubernetes and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) faced growing identity, application, and security management challenges as its network of contractors and applications expanded. Beyond these issues, even if the team was made aware of a rogue app or an over-provisioned contractor, it was time-consuming and tedious to identify the responsible application owner and confirm that the necessary access changes were completed. Then, The Linux Foundation learned about Zilla Security.
We didn’t have a clear, unified view of all the SaaS applications in use across the enterprise. Offboarding users, especially contractors, was a manual and slow process, and there were security gaps we didn’t have visibility into.”
Heather Willson
Product and IT Support Manager
The Identity Governance Goals
From his first interaction with the Zilla team, Steve Ira, VP of IT at the Linux Foundation, immediately spotted an opportunity to enhance the organizational identity governance strategy. Zilla Security had exactly what The Linux Foundation needed in terms of enterprise-wide visibility, offboarding capabilities, and the ability to remediate identity exposures. It wasn’t a difficult decision to move forward with Zilla.
The first step, though, would be to integrate a broad application estate, including an array of SaaS and home-grown apps to enable access to entitlement-level data in each of the applications. Steve was happy to see that Zilla was up to the challenge.
The entire deployment and setup process happened quickly, with the Linux team being impressed by the intuitive nature of Zilla and quality and speed of support received for any questions that emerged.
Once Zilla was in place, the Linux Foundation team was finally able to view, analyze, and remediate some of the potential security vulnerabilities they suspected were lurking in the environment.
I was impressed by the extent of integrations for Zilla, across all of the different apps and SaaS vendors that we’re using and for ones we’re continuing to add.”
Steve Ira
VP of IT
The security dashboard is a key feature for us, because of how easy it is to see critical or high-severity security issues at a glance. It’s simple to share findings with app owners for quick resolution. When the Snowflake issue emerged, for example, it immediately showed us which accounts didn’t have MFA enabled, and we were able to remediate them right away.”
Heather Willson
Product and IT Support Manager
The Linux Foundation team also used Zilla to automate regular user access reviews. Upon completing their first access review, the IT team immediately revoked 10% of permissions. The user access review automation continues to provide value for the team as the number of applications the business chooses to use grows and they continue to be able to proactively remediate exposures such as orphaned or over-privileged identities.
Implementing Zilla has been like trading in a magnifying glass for a high-powered microscope. The ZUS browser plugin, generic API support, and CSV upload capabilities allow us to track ALL our apps, not just some of them, “which ensures we don’t have blind spots in our access reviews. I also appreciate that Zilla’s native integrations work with only ‘read’ level access: so we have peace of mind to hook up even our complex, critical services like cloud providers.”
Eric Searcy
Director of Architecture
The Impact
Zilla has given The Linux Foundation IT team the visibility and capacity to move faster, reduce risk, and increase operational efficiency. Additionally, the team has leveraged Zilla to drive accountability for security best practices throughout the organization. The IT team doesn’t have the resources to hand-hold every other department’s user and access management, but Zilla helps.
In this way, Zilla is enabling the IT team to better scale their recommendations, requirements, and security insights across the stakeholder estate.
The Outlook
The Linux Foundation is pleased with how, in partnership with Zilla, they’ve enhanced visibility across the environment, offboarded users faster and more thoroughly, strengthened their identity security posture, automated access reviews, and empowered other teams to take more ownership over access and security. As the Linux Foundation continues to grow and evolve, Zilla remains a trusted partner.
What Zilla security allows us to do is to empower the application owners so that they are accountable and they have better visibility into account management, onboarding and offboarding. Marketing, for example, isn’t scrutinizing their access in the same way as IT. Zilla gives us the ability to make them aware of specific concerns that they can remediate.”
Heather Willson
Product and IT Support Manager
About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation provides a neutral, trusted hub for developers to code, manage, and scale open technology projects. The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.
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