Pizza giant deploys endpoint, identity and cloud security plus next-gen SIEM from the unified Falcon platform, gaining better protection and speed with fewer point products
Domino’s is the largest pizza company in the world, reaching more than 90 international markets through its successful franchise model. One of those markets is eastern Europe, where Domino’s Pizza Eurasia operates 830 stores across Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan.
Domino’s Pizza Eurasia faces two main cybersecurity challenges. One is the complexity of securing a hybrid infrastructure composed of local and global providers of IaaS, SaaS and PaaS, plus various on-premises systems and every type of endpoint imaginable. The other is consistency — keeping all of these systems stable and secure every second of every day.
Mehmet Halit Sumen became Head of IT for Domino’s Pizza Eurasia in 2022. As a first order of business, he assessed the company’s security stack and was dissatisfied with the uncorrelated architecture of the solutions, and the poor visibility and unreliable protection he was getting from the current endpoint security vendors.
“Our biggest challenge was false positives,” explained Sumen. “Any policy we enforce within our network might cause an outage. And since we operate 24/7, any outage can result in revenue loss … so it’s important our SOC operates efficiently and effectively.”
After a thorough market assessment, Domino’s Pizza Eurasia chose the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon® cybersecurity platform, CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security, CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM and CrowdStrike Falcon® Complete for 24/7 managed protection across the company’s endpoints, identity and cloud environments.
Consolidating with CrowdStrike
Sumen knew decreasing false positives required a modern cybersecurity platform that could ingest data from multiple sources, correlate it and deliver results with high confidence. He also wanted to consolidate as much as possible with one vendor to reduce the complexity and slowdowns his team faced in juggling 25+ point security products.
With these requirements, Domino’s Pizza Eurasia evaluated CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Checkpoint and Trend Micro. CrowdStrike came out on top.
“CrowdStrike was the only vendor that offered the correlation coverage we needed. Now, every component of our infrastructure is protected,” said Sumen.
Domino’s Pizza Eurasia quickly deployed the Falcon platform with no reboots or downtime, allowing the company to operate normally throughout the migration. CrowdStrike Falcon® Insight XDR for extended detection and response was the first module deployed, giving the company complete endpoint visibility and protection.
With the Falcon agent deployed, Domino’s Pizza Eurasia began to consolidate on CrowdStrike, soon adding CrowdStrike Falcon® Identity Protection to stop modern identity-based attacks.
“With Falcon Identity Protection, all of our Active Directory-based identity systems are now integrated under one tool, so any anomalies can be investigated by our SOC,” said Sumen.
The company’s legacy SIEM was next on the list. During his initial assessment, Sumen found 60% of the logs coming from the SIEM couldn’t be used by decision-making systems. By switching to Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, Domino’s Pizza Eurasia gains the speed and scale of a cloud-native SIEM, plus the ability to unify first- and third-party Falcon data, native threat intelligence, AI and workflow automation on a single platform.
Cloud Security Delivers Envelope of Protection
Cloud security was the next piece of the puzzle. Domino’s Pizza Eurasia runs a multi-cloud environment with AWS, Microsoft Azure and a local cloud provider. Before its adoption of CrowdStrike, gaps existed in workload protection, exposing these environments to attacks.
Once again, the company was able to extend protections using the single Falcon agent. Falcon Cloud Security is the industry’s only unified agent and agentless cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) for code to cloud protection, integrating pre-runtime and runtime protection in a single platform.
With Falcon Cloud Security, Domino’s Pizza Eurasia was able to secure its virtual machines and Kubernetes environments with agent-based runtime protection. For its SaaS and PaaS environments, where agents can’t be deployed, Falcon Cloud Security delivers agentless protection through API integrations, giving the company complete cloud detection and response capabilities with the addition of Falcon Complete.
“We used the single Falcon agent to deploy Falcon Cloud Security,” said Sumen. “Now we have Falcon Cloud Security as an envelope for complete visibility of our cloud infrastructure and Falcon Complete to quickly remediate any threats that arise.”
False Positives Down 95%
Consolidating on the Falcon platform has been an effective strategy for Domino’s Pizza Eurasia, enabling the company to eliminate six security point products while gaining new protections for its identity and cloud environments.
Sumen’s other strategic move was choosing Falcon Complete for 24/7 managed detection and response. With only three security employees, his team struggled to provide around-the-clock security before CrowdStrike. Falcon Complete acts as a seamless extension of Sumen’s team, delivering 24/7 expert monitoring, proactive threat hunting, integrated threat intelligence and full-cycle remediation delivered by CrowdStrike experts.
Falcon Complete manages the full CrowdStrike deployment at Domino’s Pizza Eurasia. By going with the tested and proven global leader in MDR, Sumen and his team have realized tremendous results: False positives have dropped by 95%, headcount needs have dropped, and detection and response times have dramatically improved from days to minutes.
“The time savings and efficiency gains have been huge for us,” concluded Sumen. “With the Falcon platform and Falcon Complete, CrowdStrike has given us better, faster, streamlined security.”
Additional Resources
- CrowdStrike was named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Endpoint Protection Platforms — read more in this blog: Furthest Right in Vision. Highest in Ability to Execute. Only CrowdStrike.
- To learn what other industry analysts are saying about CrowdStrike, visit the Industry Recognition webpage.
- Test CrowdStrike next-gen AV for yourself with a free trial of CrowdStrike Falcon® Prevent.
