Sutton and East Surrey Water (SESW) has successfully deployed ForeScout CounterACT to ensure appropriate endpoint protection across endpoints.
SESW supplies drinking water to approximately 670,000 residents in 284,000 properties in East Surrey and parts of West Sussex, West Kent and South London, which covers 835 square kilometres (322 square miles). SESW supplies, on average, 160 million litres of water per day, a figure that can rise to 220 million litres during the summer.
When SESW began looking for a solution to provide network visibility and control, it approached its long-standing IT integration partner, BlueFort Security, a UK-based specialist integrator of enterprise IT solutions in the security and mobility space, who recommended ForeScout CounterACT, and offered an on-site proof of concept to the SESW IT security team. During the evaluation, the water company assessed CounterACT’s suitability, and found that it delivered broader functionality than the benchmark requirement, while staying within SESW’s budget.
“Like all organisations, we have a limited IT security budget and have to ensure that we maximise any IT security investment,” said Michael Cock, group information technology manager of Sutton and East Surrey Water. “Once we identified ForeScout as a potential solution we found that there were very few direct comparators in the market – certainly nothing with the same scope. The price and breadth of CounterACT provided strong advantages over alternative solutions that we evaluated.”
ForeScout not only exceeded the requirements, but also maximised internal security compliance by delivering greater operational oversight of authorised and unauthorised users, devices and software on its network. CounterACT exceeded SESW’s compliance requirements, while requiring minimal man-hours to maintain the solution. More importantly, ForeScout’s ControlFabric architecture enables CounterACT and other IT systems to exchange information, allowing SESW to achieve a more holistic security posture. SESW capitalises on these opportunities by integrating CounterACT with their McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (McAfee ePO) centralised security management software and anti-virus solutions.
“In the quest to make our internal network security as strong as our external network security, our primary concern was to source an auditable and complete IT discovery tool. Prior to ForeScout we used a number of disparate tools for asset discovery and audit, and a significant amount of manual work was required to collate all of the data, which introduces risk,” explained Cock. “The ForeScout solution eliminated this problem and the fact it is so much more than an audit and discovery tool added real value to us.”
