MANE: Privileged Remote Access Drives Security & Simplification

Combining a Tradition of Trade Secrecy with Operational Excellence in a Mobile, Remote Environment

MANE has challenged itself to preserve its business model for the long term, while staying true to its authentic values – and maintaining the secrecy surrounding its formulas. Amidst a fast-evolving world where workplaces are experiencing accelerated digital transformation and relying more heavily on remote workers, MANE has been compelled to rethink its growth strategy. In reviewing the needs of their IT infrastructure, MANE sought out a secure solution to enable productivity for its modern work environment – while ensuring its trade secrets stay secret.

Christophe Hue joined MANE as its Global CIO in May 2018. He worked on devising an IT development strategy for the group worldwide. This strategy involved doubling the focus on user experience in each business line, as well as on collaboration between subsidiaries. Hue works closely with Benjamin Serre, who joined MANE in January 2019 as Global CTO. Serre joined the firm prior to the global pandemic, at a time when the company was not prepared for a future of teleworking. While the company had established Webex as a basic remote collaboration tool, it had not been widely adopted and end users were frequently leveraging Skype or other insecure and self-provisioned solutions, creating a shadow IT problem.

MANE also needed to improve data and information system security by enhancing access controls, privilege management, and visibility over its numerous third-party suppliers and systems managers.

Serre and his team desired to secure the connections of sites and subsidiaries, while enabling mobility of employees and third-party access. This was achieved by implementing the BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access solution. By streamlining the working experience and aiming for operational excellence, MANE is now well on the way to becoming a smart factory.

Security And Simplification: Keys To The Success Of The PAM Project

The IT team identified the need to mature its privileged access security and drew on its familiarity with the PAM market and on audits detailing the firm’s use cases. MANE’s Information System environment was complex, and the IT team wanted a PAM solution that would not only improve security posture, but also help simplify administration.

The implementation project kicked off in September 2020 with an audit of the group’s IT environment and ecosystem. This was followed by a pilot phase. Ultimately, the solution will be used by IT and production staff, a total of 165 people in different sites worldwide; first in-house, and later by third-party suppliers and service providers.

Results Achieved With BeyondTrust

By improving security and simplifying processes, Privileged Remote Access is expected to help optimize IT and OT operations across the business and its partners. Moreover, MANE expects the BeyondTrust solution to have a positive financial impact, with strong ROI achieved via simplified administration, automated workflows, and mitigation of cyber risks. Because the BeyondTrust solution can handle such a breadth of use cases, MANE can streamline many security controls via one solution across the globe.

While some initial adopters expressed concern about changes the rollout might entail in their everyday working habits, those concerns have been addressed thanks to a carefully planned adoption campaign as well as workflow improvements delivered by the solution.

Up Next: Better Management of Privilege Escalation

The implementation of BeyondTrust’s Privileged Remote Access solution is only the first step in MANE’s PAM strategy. Mane has chosen this solution to protect access to their IT and OT environments passwords and servers—locking down sessions, securing assets, servers, and networking.

“Over the next fifteen months, we’ll be replicating this model for our data centers in France, our data rooms, and for local services supporting production environments in our major sites in every region,” says Serre. ”We’re also looking at replicating the model for our sites in the United States, Asia, and South America. Doing so would be a natural extension of what we’ve done with the help of BeyondTrust. We’re also aiming to improve privilege escalation for our service desk, delivering better control and management, and thus, giving the team a better working environment, while avoiding any security risks.”