Case Studies > SEGA Europe Enhances Security with Sumo Logic's Cloud-Native Solution

SEGA Europe Enhances Security with Sumo Logic's Cloud-Native Solution

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

Europe

Country

United Kingdom
France
Canada

Product

Sumo Logic Continuous Intelligence Platform
AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Microsoft Office 365

Tech Stack

AWS
Microsoft Azure
Sumo Logic
Kubernetes

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements
Digital Expertise

Technology Category

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
Cybersecurity & Privacy - Security Compliance

Applicable Industries

Software

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Quality Assurance

Services

System Integration
Training
Software Design & Engineering Services

About The Customer

With an illustrious history dating back to the 1940s, SEGA’s mission has always been to entertain the world with creative, innovative experiences. From its inception, the company has been a pioneer, delighting people with offerings that have included coin operated machines, home consoles, handheld devices, apps, and movies. As just one example, today tens of millions of enthusiastic fans eagerly anticipate the next Sonic The Hedgehog installment. SEGA Europe, Ltd. is the European Distribution arm of Tokyo-based SEGA Games. SEGA Europe is headquartered in London, but wholly owns the development studios, Relic Entertainment in Vancouver, Amplitude Studios in Paris and Creative Assembly, Sports Interactive, Two Point Studios and Hardlight, all based in the UK. Every enterprise in the entertainment business must satisfy their sophisticated, demanding customers, and SEGA Europe is no exception to this rule. The company strives to stay ahead of its competition through a series of measures that range from continuously polling its fans to get their feedback and understand how they’re interacting with the company’s products to launching inventive new platforms such as gaming as a service. Acquisitions are also a big part of how SEGA Europe expands its product collection to keep up with the latest market trends.

The Challenge

SEGA Europe sought techniques to strengthen how it safeguarded the personal details supplied by millions of loyal fans. A key aspect of this exercise was consolidating security-related machine data from the company’s hybrid cloud into a single source of truth, while also establishing repeatable processes for onboarding yet-to-be-acquired game studios. Although the initial SIEM ventures appeared to be promising, the company soon encountered a number of daunting drawbacks including: deploying these solutions required making weighty expenditures for dedicated hardware and related infrastructure, SEGA Europe’s site-specific requirements necessitated significant outlays for customization, and the SIEM applications were overly brittle, and needed costly professional services to address errors and performance issues. It became apparent that the situation was untenable, and that failing to resolve these shortfalls could jeopardize SEGA Europe’s relentless commitment to the safety and security of its customers. In response, the company began an aggressive search to identify a replacement that could also serve as a ‘single source of truth’ for its nascent security operations center (SOC).

The Solution

The company chose Sumo Logic’s cloud-native machine data management solution to replace its legacy Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system. As part of this undertaking, SEGA Europe concentrated all of its log files from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure into Sumo Logic and then configured customized dashboards to address precise user needs. SEGA Europe conducted its Sumo Logic rollout solely with in-house personnel. With an eye towards the future–including being prepared to onboard new acquisitions more quickly–the company’s implementation team invested sufficient time to fully establish a logical architecture. These efforts entailed defining consistent naming conventions and configuring data containers for anticipated growth, along with performing intensive testing. With the preparation phases complete, the company then speedily transitioned into production, beginning by ingesting machine data –from a diverse set of sources such as AWS GuardDuty, Microsoft Advanced Thread Protection, anti-virus logs, and internally developed applications–into its new Sumo Logic instance.

Operational Impact

SEGA Europe now has a single pane of glass to present critical security information. This resulted in significant improvements in how the company detected, escalated, and ultimately corrected potential security violations.
The primary Sumo Logic user community is comprised of approximately 15 people, supporting end users throughout the entire organization as well as the company’s network operations center (NOC) and security operations center (SOC).
The company fields a far-reaching assortment of pre-built Sumo Logic applications and alerts meant to provide deep security insights and threat analysis across its entire technology inventory.
SEGA Europe has also crafted an ever-evolving assortment of its own highly customized, specialized dashboards. This has reduced training requirements for the security team: rather than needing to gain expertise on every element in the company’s technology portfolio, they can instead focus on the aggregated information presented by Sumo Logic.
The machine data that’s been amassed within Sumo Logic powers a number of interesting use cases. For example, Sega’s security team utilizes the well-regarded, proven Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) loop when attempting to research and resolve incidents that may threaten the company’s assets or data.

Quantitative Benefit

Sumo Logic has shortened the amount of time it takes to investigate and resolve a problem by 20%.
Originally, the company aggregated 30 GB of machine data each day into Sumo Logic. However, this amount quickly ballooned to over 50 GB per day.