Bala Vishwanath

With origins dating back 25 years, Logicalis is a leading provider of global IT solutions and managed services. From home base in the UK, Logicalis designs, builds, and supports IT solutions for customers throughout Europe, North America, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. The company now has more than 6,500 employees focused on accelerating the digital transformation of its 10,000 customers around the world.

With a globally connected network of specialist hubs, sector-leading experts, and strategic technology partnerships, Logicalis addresses key customer priorities such as revenue and business growth, operational efficiency, innovation, risk and compliance, data governance, and sustainability. But with a wide range of cloud customers spanning industries and geographies, the compliance component has sometimes proved challenging.

The Challenge of Customizing Compliance In addition to meeting industry standards such as NIST, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA, many enterprises have their own compliance standards that align with specific organizational requirements, and these standards require customized compliance policies. Logicalis is a perfect example. In order to meet the needs of their customers, the company needed the ability to implement custom policies in their Microsoft Azure environment and map them to custom standards. They also needed the ability to identify the severity/risk level of each control in a policy.

Logicalis then needed the ability to monitor the policies regularly to ensure compliance, in addition to conducting on-demand assessments. They also wanted to measure and score the compliance level of each customer, providing a path towards improved compliance.

A Highly Flexible Governance Solution Logicalis went in search of a cloud governance solution to address these critical needs but found only one that could provide the necessary capabilities – CoreStack. Other vendors could provide “as-is” standards with no option to customize them, but CoreStack NextGen Cloud Governance was able to offer industry standards as well as the ability to customize them.

The CoreStack solution has enabled Logicalis to create over 100 custom policies to suit a wide range of requirements – none of which were available natively within the Azure cloud platform. For example, they created a custom policy that monitors virtual machines purchased as Reserved Instances, checks their expiration dates, and provides early notification to cloud admins to take action before reservations expire. Policies like this prevent customers from getting charged at the higher rates of on-demand resources.

To enhance security of Microsoft Azure subscriptions, Logicalis created a custom policy that monitors the expiration date of the secret keys that store login credentials, encryption certificates, and other sensitive data within the Azure cloud environment. The policy enables dashboard visibility into the secret key status of clients across the Logicalis customer base and notifies the client when it’s time for renewal.

To enable cost optimization and reduce their energy footprint, they created a custom policy to start and stop specific groups of VMs at particular times of day. The policy handles multiple power on/off schedules for multiple groups of resources, amplifying the energy savings.

In addition to creating custom policies like these, the nimble CoreStack solution enables Logicalis to assign each control in a policy a severity / risk rating of high, medium, or low based on the importance of that control to the organization. Logicalis is also able to provide customers with continuous compliance monitoring and comprehensive audit reporting. In fact, Logicalis provides customers with a detailed compliance assessment following each compliance audit. This assessment includes a compliance score – a weighted average that includes the raw compliance score that takes into account the severity and risk rating for every control in the policy. This score is presented as a percentage and gives customers a benchmark to drive continuous improvement.

Compliance As a Competitive Advantage Logicalis has seen a number of measurable benefits as a result of implementing the CoreStack NextGen Cloud Governance SecOps and CloudOps modules. For example, they've improved the time it takes to identify a customer’s secret key violations by 75%, while automation has reduced manual work by 40%.

More generally, the CoreStack solution has boosted their compliance posture, giving clients the assurance that compliance is well in hand, and ensuring that business operations are not disrupted by non-compliance. It has enabled them to land more clients in new, highly regulated markets. And it has increased the number of clients they can service thanks to automation of compliance processes.

Perhaps most surprising of all, the solution has allowed Logicalis to turn compliance into a competitive advantage, as they now have the tools they need to help set new clients up for compliance success. Not only can they meet clients’ requirements for customized compliance standards, they can also audit new clients before taking them on, then use the assessment results to set up a roadmap to get clients compliant as part of the onboarding process.

The CoreStack NextGen Cloud Governance Portfolio CoreStack SecOps is part of Cumulus, a suite of NextGen Cloud Governance modules that leverage AI to provide continuous and autonomous governance for FinOps, SecOps, and CloudOps across multi-cloud. The CoreStack NextGen Cloud Governance platform is designed to be Continuous, Holistic, Autonomous, Integrated, and Nimble – what we call CHAIN.

NextGen Cloud Governance helps you mitigate risk, accelerate delivery, experiment more, optimize performance, and innovate rather than just improve. It gives enterprises the capabilities and confidence to accelerate their digital ambitions, enabling them to more quickly and easily capitalize on the opportunities that matter.

Learn more about CoreStack @ corestack.io

Bala Vishwanath

Seattle, Washington, United States 500+ connections

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Experience

CoreStack

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Education

University of California, Berkeley

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