How Glu Mobile Used Axonius to Build a Comprehensive Asset Database
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Glu Mobile is a leading developer and publisher of mobile games. Its ecosystem includes nearly 1,000 employees globally, as well as contractors, customer care teams, business partners, and third-party vendors — with less than 25 team members across IT, Security, and DevOps.
800-1,000
Creating an accurate asset inventory in order to secure their environment, despite the challenges of remote work.
With better asset management, Glu Mobile minimized user access risk and built a real-time inventory that worked for its unique assets. The company’s team leveraged those insights to enhance security posture and hygiene.
Navigating Asset Security During Remote Work
Remote work reveals digital process inefficiencies and asset management gaps at the best of times. For John Fox, senior security engineer at Glu Mobile, the dramatic push toward remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated an already-urgent desire to find a better asset management solution for his sprawling ecosystem.
Fox and his team identified two critical priorities:
- They had to determine where and how users were accessing the company’s systems remotely in order to authenticate access.
- The team needed insights into which assets needed protection — specifically, what data existed where and how sensitive it was.
However, they faced a significant challenge in addressing these priorities. Because Glu Mobile acquired several companies, Fox’s team struggled to maintain a data inventory that was accurate as the business expanded. COVID-19 exacerbated the issue as the company transitioned to remote work for the health and safety of its global employee base.
Searching for Better Inventory Tools
The Glu Mobile team didn’t have an accurate inventory of all assets, largely because their existing tools failed to live up to the task. Inventory solutions couldn’t provide an up-to-date look into the data — counts differed between vulnerability management, endpoint protection, and inventory management sources.
“We had issues with name resolution, user access, and version controls,” said Fox. The company badly needed a way to gain a single source of truth that showed all assets in one easy-to-use database. Meanwhile, Glu Mobile made do with labor-intensive tools that couldn’t live up to the realities of acquisitions, much less remote work.
Finding the Best Data Aggregation Solution
Glu Mobile sought a solution that could fully compile their assets and give them a “single source of truth” view into their assets and user access.
So, when Fox saw an Axonius demonstration during a security webinar, he felt it was precisely the tool his team needed to address pandemic concerns and long-standing data needs. The team moved quickly out of necessity, and the Axonius Cybersecurity Asset Management Platform was implemented within a month or two of the initial demonstration.
“We tested Axonius against other products for comparison. Axonius was the only one that would actually do a full-on data aggregation. A lot of companies try to do the same thing, but it’s Axonius that does it better,” he explained.
"Axonius gives us visibility, transparency, and an accurate count of our assets. It enables us to be agile and get ahead of risk faster with a better source of truth."
John Fox, Senior Security Engineer, Glu Mobile
Elevating Ecosystem Security and Hygiene
The Axonius platform immediately transformed Glu Mobile’s approach to asset management, delivering real-time insights into their unique assets, security gaps, and connections. It also enabled Fox and his team to minimize user access risk, addressing remote work challenges.
Now, Fox’s team has been able to focus on enhancing security for all their assets. “We began to implement new security stacks and new security controls into our system with Axonius. It identified missing software in computers attempting to connect to our system. It helped us maintain requirements on devices during a dynamic pandemic situation.
Benefiting From Speed and Support
The speed of the solution has revolutionized the Glu Mobile team. “Axonius eliminated our previous time-consuming processes and brought assets together in a system that acts as window across our business. Not only is it accurate, it’s also faster than any native tool since it’s all there,” Fox said.
Fox also noted the Axonius team’s excellent customer service and update support. “I appreciate that I can connect with someone from Axonius quickly. Our team also gets valuable insights into Axonius platform upgrades regarding new adapters — if we need to, we can work with the Axonius team to figure out a solution that works for us relatively quickly.”
Fox says companies that are in need of an updated asset inventory or working with a new influx of third-party vendors — or even those who feel they already have a good solution — have much to gain from working with Axonius. “Other solutions offer less and don’t let you correlate aggregated data between devices and users. Axonius does both, for less.”
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