Insurance and warranty companies deal with highly valuable and sensitive data daily, making them a large target for cybersecurity attacks. It is extremely important that companies with sensitive data are proactive in their security strategies, especially when it comes to new technologies. Introducing new technology to the organization can reveal vulnerabilities which is why it is important to stay proactive and assess the security landscape ahead of time.
 

About

For more than 40 years, this Canada-based insurance company has been providing home warranty protection to homeowners in the greater Toronto, Ontario area. They have provided protection to over two million Ontario homes with the goal of serving new home buyers and homeowners and helping them to ensure that one of their biggest investments is protected.

Business Challenge

The home warranty company was planning on going live with a new instance of Salesforce and they wanted to confirm security best practices that they needed to apply. The CRM team at BDO Digital engaged with the client to assess their current security environment as it related to the new product and to help minimize risks before the go-live date.

The client had a list of items to immediately remediate before the go-live date. They were especially concerned with the platform configuration and that the current system administrators were missing an aspect of the configuration that would potentially expose sensitive company information. They also did not have clear insight into the underlying or related code base supporting the new Salesforce instance.  With a tight timeline, they needed to quickly confirm security best practices and remediation decisions for their new product instance.

Solution

BDO Digital used a combination of automated scanning tools and manual evaluation to conduct a security assessment of the client’s environment. As part of the evaluation, BDO Digital delivered a detailed overview of the risk items that needed to be considered by IT management. A risk rating framework was also applied to help them identify critical, high, medium, and low priority items. This would then help inform the client’s priority and remediation decisions. Despite the tight timeline, BDO Digital was able to provide a comprehensive cyber security review with recommended risk mitigation priorities in a short timeframe in order to satisfy the previously established go-live date.
 

Results

By engaging with BDO Digital, the home warranty company reduced the risk of un-remediated items in their new production environment. They felt more confident releasing the new production Salesforce instance and in the confidentiality and integrity of the Salesforce data being used in business operations.

The home warranty company was very impressed with BDO Digital’s work and IT management at their company communicated that they would like to use the scanning tools as a part of a recuring monthly security scanning process. This will significantly help improve productivity, as a typical security assessment in the past would have required a lot of manual processes.