Deliver performance at scale to meet the business demands of Fortune 500 clients with highly complex environments
Protect customer and business data with complete, automated visibility into weak ciphers
Enhanced customer experience with better application performance and faster remediation
The Beginning
The team at Mitchell needed a solution to provide complete security and performance visibility across their environment.
Founded in 1946, Mitchell International has grown to become North America's largest provider of collision repair information. Today, the company's solutions have expanded beyond collision repair and physical damage claims to include auto casualty, workers' compensation, and pharmacy claims handling. Headquartered in San Diego, California, Mitchell processes tens of millions of electronic transactions each month for more than 300 insurance companies, including a majority of the nation's top 25 insurance payers, and more than 30,000 collision repair facilities.
Mitchell builds and operates many software products that the nation's top insurance companies rely on daily. Supporting these products, the developers who build them, and the customers who use them, is a major part of the job of the highly technical Network and Telecom Systems team led by Senior Manager Chris Wenger.
Wenger's team also manages Mitchell's datacenter connectivity and provides network security services for the business. As the escalation point for troubleshooting issues for many of Mitchell's internal teams, Wenger and his team needed a better way to investigate performance and security issues across the organization's infrastructure.
With insights from ExtraHop, we can work with our customers and update systems to eliminate insecure communication pathways and better secure our company's environment as a whole.
Chris Wenger
Sr. Manager of Network & Telecommunications,
Mitchell International
The Transformation
ExtraHop helps scale their business and IT operations to help meet the demands of their Fortune 500 customer base.
After evaluating different solutions on the market, Mitchell found that ExtraHop was the only solution that could provide the network-level visibility needed, at the scale and pace a modern hybrid enterprise requires.
"The second we plugged ExtraHop in, we started seeing things we couldn't see before. Nothing else could give us this visibility until ExtraHop came along," says Wenger. "Since it has been installed, ExtraHop has become a key part of our daily operations and workflow. We use it every day, multiple times a day. ExtraHop is one of the first tools we use when there's a problem," says Wenger.
Adoption of ExtraHop continues to expand internally at Mitchell as more and more teams leverage the insights and are requesting access to the data for their other purposes.
The Outcome
ExtraHop provides the visibility and investigation capability they need to deliver reliable outcomes.
Exposing Vulnerabilities
The first major project Mitchell used ExtraHop was for improving overall security hygiene, including the deprecation of the SSLv3 protocol. ExtraHop was used to discover which devices in its network were still communicating over the old, insecure protocol and upgrade the encryption. Continued use of the SSLv3 protocol meant potential risks to the confidentiality of Mitchell's communications with its customers so it was critical for Wenger and his team to know where these vulnerabilities existed.
"We continue to use ExtraHop for ongoing visibility into certificate communications and ciphers that are being used in order to determine where old ciphers need to be removed," explains Wenger. "With insights from ExtraHop, we can work with our customers to update systems from both ends and eliminate insecure communication pathways and better secure our company's environment as a whole.
Eliminating Blind Spots
Many of Mitchell's customers are Fortune 500 companies with large, complex, dispersed networks. In the past, when customers contacted Mitchell stating that "something is slow", it was difficult for the Mitchell support teams to quickly identify and resolve issues – especially when a customer had limited technical know-how or visibility into its network. With ExtraHop in place, Mitchell gained the ability to identify issues such as packet drops and other communication problems on the customer's side which proved to be instrumental in troubleshooting and fast resolution.