CheckPoint Software > Case Studies > Prominent Museum in D.C. Enhances Security with Check Point's Consolidated Infinity Architecture

Prominent Museum in D.C. Enhances Security with Check Point's Consolidated Infinity Architecture

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Public Cloud

Applicable Industries

Glass
National Security & Defense

Applicable Functions

Human Resources
Maintenance

Use Cases

Inventory Management
Tamper Detection

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

About The Customer

The customer in this case study is a prominent Museum in D.C. that documents, studies, and interprets history. The museum has welcomed more than 40 million visitors, including 99 heads of state and more than ten million school-age children. It keeps one of the world's largest archives of significant historical events, focused on their digital preservation and storage. More than 16.5 million people from over 200 countries visit the site annually, which is available in 16 languages. The museum's systems are barraged by hate emails, vicious social media posts, and increasingly sophisticated 5th generation cyber-attacks from around the world.

The Challenge

The prominent Museum in D.C., which documents, studies, and interprets history, faced a significant challenge in preserving and protecting irreplaceable documentation, photographs, videos, and recordings. The museum, which has welcomed over 40 million visitors, including 99 heads of state and more than ten million school-age children, was under constant threat from fifth-generation cyber-attacks. The museum's systems were barraged by hate emails, vicious social media posts, and increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks from around the world. The museum also needed to protect user identities and credentials against account hijackings and secure SaaS and hosted applications across a multi-vendor hybrid cloud environment. The security team's first challenge was to manage and protect user identities across the entire infrastructure, with employees and partners located around the world with varying levels of online access to institutional assets.

The Solution

To address these challenges, the museum turned to the Check Point Infinity Architecture. This included Check Point CloudGuard SaaS, Check Point CloudGuard IaaS, Check Point SandBlast Network, and Check Point R80 Security Management. The museum chose SaaS applications, including Microsoft Office 365, Google Suite, file-sharing, and operations solutions, each hosted in its respective vendor's cloud and protected by Check Point CloudGuard SaaS. This provided zero-day threat, identity, and data protection while preventing employee account breaches. The museum also utilized Check Point CloudGuard IaaS to protect its applications that had been moved to public clouds. Check Point CloudGuard IaaS extended the same protection as the Check Point firewalls to the museum's applications in these public cloud environments. Check Point SandBlast provided multi-layered protection from known threats and zero-day attacks using Threat Emulation technology, as well as identity awareness, content awareness, antivirus, anti-bot, intrusion prevention, application control, and URL filtering capabilities.

Operational Impact

The implementation of Check Point Infinity Architecture has brought significant operational benefits to the museum. The security team now manages all security policies, threat prevention, and operations in a single pane of glass through Check Point’s R80 Security Management. This has eliminated the need for monitoring multiple systems and ensures consistent policy across cloud and premises environments. The team is also able to leverage automation of routine tasks to increase efficiency. Since deploying Check Point Infinity with CloudGuard SaaS, the museum has defeated multiple Gmail hijacking attempts. In one case, CloudGuard SaaS detected an attempt by someone in New York to access a Gmail account in Argentina. Check Point R80 enables the team to view and correlate events across multiple clouds and physical firewalls with real-time visibility into the barrage of threats targeting the Museum.

Quantitative Benefit

Prevented multiple SaaS account breach attempts
Reduced security team overhead by 50% through automation and management consolidation
Ensured consistent policy and security across multiple vendors, cloud, and on-premises environments