With its online gaming platform built on AWS, the developer needed frictionless security for cloud development and production flows.

Games developer Wizards of the Coast is set to provide frictionless security for agile game development and delivery in Amazon Web Services.

Gamers may know the American firm as the makers of popular titles including “Dungeons & Dragons” and “Magic: The Gathering”. In the highly competitive arena of online gaming, speed is key, and Wizards’ game development teams need to be able to roll out updates several times a day. That means security has to protect business applications and customer data without compromising speed or agility.

With its online gaming platform built on Amazon Web Services, Wizards needed a way to provide frictionless security across its cloud development and production environments. To address this challenge, they have chosen a solution from ExtraHop.

The solution is fully cloud-native and it leverages Amazon VPC Traffic Mirroring to provide the agentless visibility and packet-level granularity that security analysts and developers need to understand risk, as well as detect, investigate, and respond to threats. Called Reveal(x) Cloud, it also facilitates multiple parts of the IT organization to see and understand what is happening in their environment. This helps alignment different functions such as development, security, and IT operations, and reduces ‘tool sprawl’, thus making the development process more efficient.

Said Dan McDaniel, Chief Architect and Information Security Officer at Wizards of the Coast: “Developers aren’t anti-security; what they are is anti-friction. With Reveal(x), we’re removing that friction traditionally associated with security and becoming part of their development cycle. That’s a win-win across the board.”

When Wizards added SaaS-based network detection and response (NDR) from Reveal(x) Cloud to their security suite, they empowered their security and development teams to work better together.

“What ExtraHop allows me to do is to provide security without validating the architecture of their games before they go live,” McDaniel added. “It gives (developers) the freedom to create and go, but I still have visibility and transparency into my risk.”