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Williams Case Study

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Skyhigh for Shadow IT

Tech Stack

Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Digital Expertise
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Cybersecurity & Privacy - Cloud Security

Applicable Industries

Oil & Gas

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Cybersecurity

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration

About The Customer

Williams is a Fortune 500 large-scale energy infrastructure company that gathers, processes and delivers natural gas for and to thousands of customers nationwide. Based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Williams was recently recognized by Fortune Magazine as the #1 Most Admired U.S. Energy Company for 2015. With more than 5,800 employees across five major offices and more than 150 field offices across the United States and Canada, Williams has taken an open approach to cloud use and adoption, allowing their employees to utilize the cloud services needed to get their jobs done as efficiently as possible.

The Challenge

Williams, a large-scale energy infrastructure company, had been allowing its employees to use cloud services without a security stamp of approval. This led to a lack of visibility into the number of cloud services in use across the enterprise and the associated risks. The company was spending too many man hours assessing the security of cloud services when employees requested a new service. They were unable to enforce policies and ensure compliance without impacting the user experience. The company needed a solution to gain visibility into the cloud services being used, understand the risks, and enforce policies without affecting productivity.

The Solution

Williams decided to leverage a cloud access security broker (CASB), Skyhigh, to fully understand the risk to their organization. Upon deploying Skyhigh into their environment, they discovered that they were using more than 2,000 cloud services. Skyhigh allowed them to begin establishing and managing the risk that came along with them. The Williams team is now able to see and capture the data they need to be able to group the riskiest cloud services and block access to them, while accelerating adoption of permitted services. In addition to having the visibility needed to manage risk across the enterprise, the Williams team can also detect anomalous behavior that may be indicative of insider threats, compromised accounts, malicious or negligent behavior through Skyhigh’s machine-learning analytics, which is based on user-behavior.

Operational Impact

Minimized use of unsanctioned high-risk services and coached users to safer, sanctioned services like OneDrive, consolidating services, reducing cost and overall corporate risk.
Reduced man hours by 80% to evaluate new services and speed procurement, enabling users to meet strategic business initiatives.
Additional security controls ensure compliance with internal policies and industry regulations.

Quantitative Benefit