Entrusted with the personal data of 800m customers worldwide, the fashion group takes no chances when addressing resilience and cyber risks

With its first platform launched in 2011, Global Fashion Group (GFG) has grown to operate three fashion and lifestyle e-commerce platforms across 11 countries, connecting an assortment of more than 6,000 international, local and own brands to a market of 800m customers.

Having bought into cloud computing via Amazon Web Services for its globally sited operations, the firm has the vital task of safeguarding its cloud workloads and critical assets.

Aleksandar Radosavljevic, the firm’s Global Chief Information Security Officer, said the IT team has executed actions to consolidate technologies, mitigate cloud vulnerabilities and strengthen cybersecurity across “our IT assets, cloud resources, web applications and active directory…  to anticipate threats and prioritize remediation across our attack surface by focusing on addressing vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and entitlement issues. Cloud-based services are a key part of our business, so this preventative approach helps us enhance our cloud security posture and protect customer and business data.”

The firm’s use of an “exposure management” platform allows the IT team to see manage the firm’s three sites attack surfaces in a single pane of glass. The platform helps them to integrate and consolidate expensive point tools, which improves visibility and control across the firms’ properties. Furthermore, built-in tools — including exposure analytics and reporting functionalities — help the team to communicate cyber risk issues more effectively to non-technical stakeholders, providing actionable insights to align service level agreements and risk objectives with the firm’s strategic business accountability and development blueprint.

Ultimately, all the above cyber initiatives and zero trust network paradigm have enhanced the discoverability of IT assets, improved integration, simplified licensing processes, reduced tool complexity and costs, achieved significant time savings, and led to an overall strengthened security posture for the firm as a whole.

According to Nigel Ng, Senior Vice President (APJ), Tenable, the firm’s cybersecurity partner, GFG’s complex cybersecurity challenges have not only been addressed, but the holistic cybersecurity measures taken “also align with the unique needs” and “facilitate (resilience) in their global operations.”