Cogna Group Migrates Data Center in Record Time With Guardicore

By Admin On Jun 10, 2020

Guardicore technology improves group security both in on-premise and cloud environments; Helps compliance with the Brazilian General Personal Data Protection Act

Guardicore, a leader in data center and cloud security, announced that Cogna, a leading Brazilian educational group, has chosen the Guardicore Centra Security Platform as the tool to help perform a data center migration for one of its companies. Committed to keeping safe a tremendous amount of information related to students, proprietary materials, teaching systems, services, and application microservices, the Cogna IT team managed to successfully complete the migration in just two weeks.

Alex Amorim, the information security manager at Cogna Group, has embraced the Zero Trust concept as the most efficient way to protect the group’s IT infrastructure, applications, data, and third-party information it holds. To achieve this goal, he needed the detailed workflow segmentation that Guardicore provides, defending Cogna against external threats and from lateral threat movements inside the company’s technology environment.

Growth Challenges and Achieving Compliance

In December 2019, Cogna Group completed the acquisition of Somos, a company devoted to primary and secondary education. The contract with the datacenter provider hosting Somos would expire in one month, creating a short time span for Cogna to integrate all of the Somos data and infrastructure to the Group’s environment, which already hosted three other Cogna Group companies.

As the Guardicore Centra Security Platform had already been implemented to protect Cogna’s companies, the solution was to install the platform in the environment in which the Somos infrastructure was located before migration. Successfully carried out in two-weeks, the migration allowed for Cogna Group’s on-premise equipment to be gathered together in just one location and for the Group’s private cloud to be unified.

To mitigate risk and preserve the organization’s reputation, Cogna is committed to creating a security framework based on the principles of confidentiality, integrity and availability. These principles extend to compliance with the Brazilian General Personal Data Protection Act, ensuring the Cogna Group is ready for its full implementation when it comes into effect. The Cogna Group has been preparing to deploy LGPD since 2018 and see Guardicore’s micro-segmentation capabilities as a great ally in the protection of company data.

Protecting Cloud Managed IT Services

To ensure security against all possible threats, the Cogna Group’s plan is to extend the Guardicore Centra Security Platform to public cloud services. The Group uses multiple public clouds, in addition to its private cloud. As the responsibility for management of cloud IT solutions shifts from the company that provides colocation services to a new service provider, the Group will take the opportunity to increase its security level.

Alex Amorim counts on the Guardicore technology to achieve this goal: “Nano-segmentation is about monitoring access in order to allow only authorized users to access each server and each communication channel between machines. This is the kind of control we must have today.”

“At Guardicore, we strive to make security effective in the easiest and quickest way. Our ability to show how all systems interact allows our customers to make faster and more accurate decisions,” said Fernando Ceolin, Director Sales Engineering, Brazil – LATAM, Guardicore. “In addition, with our ability to control interactions no matter where the workloads are, they can safely make any move they need. These features have proven to be instrumental for customers all over the world who want to develop new zero trust security projects. We are proud and honored to be chosen as Cogna’s preferred security partner.”