Reduced the number of false positives by as much as 50%, keeping teams focused.
IoT monitoring of thousands of PLC devices provides security for critical operational components.
Performance detections improve uptime across the organization—and have reduced support tickets by 80 percent.
The Beginning
With rapid growth came big challenges
Litehouse Foods is an employee-owned company founded out of a family restaurant more than 50 years in Hope, Idaho. Since then, the company has continued to grow, introducing new products, expanding into new markets, and acquiring other food manufacturers.
But fast growth and acquisitions came with their own challenges. "We shifted from a mom-and-pop business to an enterprise really fast," says Ben Budge, systems administrator for Litehouse. "That meant we had to address new security issues at an enterprise level far beyond the basic firewalls and antivirus that were good enough when we were a small business."
With Reveal(x), we're able to get to the truth because it's in the packets, and we can get to it quickly. Our security and uptime are better because of it.
Ben Budge
Systems Administrator,
Litehouse Foods
The Transformation
Getting visibility at enterprise scale
In order to scale to meet the security needs of their growing organization, the security team at Litehouse sought a solution that could provide deep network visibility as well as detection and response – with a minimum of false positives. They turned to ExtraHop Reveal(x).
"One of the things that quickly became apparent was that we didn't really know what was going on behind the scenes on our own network," says Budge. "With Reveal(x), we were able to see what the network and our business apps were doing almost immediately. For instance, we discovered that the ERP system was sending passwords in plain text across our network. It was eye-opening."
The Outcome
Eye-opening results with Reveal(x)
Intelligent Security
With their previous systems, it took a small army of IT and security professionals to investigate the large volume of alerts, most of which weren't valid.
"Often, teams would spend hours digging into some obscure alert only to find that it wasn't critical," says Budge.
But with Reveal(x), the number of false positives has been reduced by 30 to 50 percent.
IoT Visibility
Litehouse also had to worry about a host of programmable logic controller (PLC) devices that are part of their manufacturing operations. Traditional security monitoring of PLC devices is challenging because most PLCs aren't designed for large-packet throughput.
With Reveal(x), the Litehouse team can mirror the packets and feed them into the devices without overloading devices with a huge packet count, providing meaningful insight into manufacturing devices.
Better Communication
The ExtraHop Reveal(x) user interface makes it easy for security and IT to communicate with business stakeholders, through dashboards that provide real-time visibility into security posture as well as global systems performance.
"Reveal(x) is easy enough to understand that a lot of our business users who may not have an advanced IT degree can still recognize what's happening and why," says Budge.
Maximum Uptime
At Litehouse, uptime and availability are central to business operations. With Reveal(x), they have the ability to detect, investigate, and respond to performance anomalies before they slow business operations.
"With Reveal(x), we're able to get to the truth because it's in the packets, and we can get to it quickly. Our security and uptime are better because of it," says Budge. "We're seeing far fewer user complaints, too. We used to field about 20 help tickets every week, but now we typically just see about four."