Armacell: Speeding Up Incident Response and Recovery with Azure Sentinel

Armacell is a global manufacturing company, providing flexible insulation foams for the equipment insulation market. As a growing company relying increasingly on the cloud, they need fortifying their defence against security threats. As part of that initiative, they needed a partner that could manage threat identification and incident response with them — and that’s where Excellium came in. Building their solution on Azure Sentinel, Excellium will help Armacell with a cost-effective approach to event collection and collation, threat detection, incident investigation, and rapid response. Read on for the details.

As a global manufacturing group, Armacell faces a multitude of security threats. A few months ago, Steiner Ufomaduh joined the company as the new Information Security Officer. He identified, proposed, and launched a number of security initiatives. One of which was the implementation of a Security Operation Centre (SOC) with the purpose of improving their ability to identify and respond to threats. Excellium was the chosen partner.

“As we worked towards moving to the cloud, we needed a solution that could make us faster in identifying threats and responding to any incidents. Azure Sentinel was the right tool for the job.”

Steiner Ufomaduh, Information Security Officer, Armacell

A Manufacturer Looking for Security Agility

Armacell is a global leader in flexible foam for the equipment insulation market and a leading provider of engineered foams. It is headquartered in Luxembourg, with 24 manufacturing facilities in 16 different countries. The strategy of the company is to globalise and harmonise its IT landscape; with a focus on the Cloud and Industry 4.0.

Armacell has made its strategy to embark on a digital transformation journey, adopting a cloud first strategy that would migrate most of its workloads to Microsoft Azure. This represented the perfect opportunity to revisit information security within Armacell’s environment and create a centralised model that was both cost-efficient and effective. The goal? Implement a global solution across the group to improve uncovering threats, responding to them, and recovering from any potential impact — without impacting business operations.

Finding the Right Partner

Steiner and his team launched the process to find and select the right partner to outsource incident response management. The best competitor would not only have to bring in their Azure Sentinel expertise but also be able to enable Armacell’s growth and evolution.

To that extent, Excellium presented a proposal that aligned with the company’s strategic objectives and showed their commitment to Armacell’s success. 

As one of the largest cybersecurity teams in Europe, Excellium offers a SOC-as-a-service approach based on the Azure Sentinel Security Information and Event management (SIEM) platform.

Beyond a comprehensive capability review and onboarding process, the approach includes event collection and collation, threat detection, incident investigation, and rapid response. This is then paired with the expertise and robust insights of their many security experts, who today act as an extension of the Armacell team. 

The solution is packaged into a pay-as-you-go model that allows Armacell to access the services they need when and as they need them resulting in an improved costs’ control.

What’s Next for Armacell and Excellium?

The SOC implementation project is still at its early stages of execution. So far, Excellium has conducted several due diligence and onboarding tasks; and is preparing to onboard log sources onto Azure Sentinel. As part of this process, the two teams have been collaborating on a regular basis, meeting at least once a week, to proactively address any gaps in the project roadmap as it is rolled out. 

Together, the two companies will continue to work moving the needle on this initiative and building resilience in Armacell’s security infrastructure, hence setting the foundations of a strong and sustainable collaboration with Excellium.

“Even at the early stages of the project, it’s clear that Excellium is committed to delivering a quality service and empowering us to better secure our systems.”

Steiner Ufomaduh, Information Security Officer, Armacell