I recently had the pleasure of sitting down for ‘coffee’ with Claudio Bolla, Global Information Security Director at INEOS to learn how he’s managing cloud manufacturing security during the pandemic. As a large chemicals company with 26,000 employees, INEOS operates 36 different business units with 196 locations around the world. Their businesses span oil and gas, energy, and chemical production. INEOS manufactures chemicals that have been used to develop the vaccine, hand sanitizer, face masks, the plastic used in aeroplane parts, just to name a few things!
I knew that INEOS did quite a bit of M&A and because of this, finds itself with many disparate businesses, such as INEOS Automotive which is building a 4×4 vehicle (inspired by the Land Rover Defender). But what I didn’t know was that INEOS has made a foray into the beautiful game of football! Turns out sports is one of INEOS’ key pillars. This started with the acquisition of Lausanne Football Club in Switzerland, followed by the Nice Football Club in France. On the philanthropic side, they’ve even developed their own football clubs in underdeveloped countries to improve the social well-being of youth.
When the pandemic hit, many companies sent all or the majority of their employees home to work remotely. However, because INEOS had physical assets with production sites, it wasn’t just a matter of telling everyone to work from home. They had to keep their manufacturing plants running! And it was critical to do so because they were making products that are used to fight the pandemic. They moved from a primarily office-based, production-site approach to a hybrid situation. This transition introduced much complexity, especially given the number of business units, differing types of products, and challenges related to maintaining a secure manufacturing environment in the cloud.
Prior to the pandemic, INEOS turned to Cisco Umbrella to migrate all of their divisions to a single provider for DNS coverage. Umbrella also gives them the ability to let each business unit decide if they want different types of policies for different types of users. With so many contrasting businesses, the security controls for each BU can vary quite a bit. Since they had already deployed Umbrella successfully, when the pandemic hit, INEOS was able to quickly secure remote manufacturing workers using the roaming client: they went from 500 users connecting per day to over 7,000 users in one weekend!
In the talk, Claudio reveals how “an unexpected benefit of Umbrella was App Discovery,” which allows them to uncover cloud storage and reduce risk. Umbrella’s CASB functionality allows customers to gain control and visibility of cloud application and service usage across their entire network, and block risky apps to improve security.
Claudio shared many, many intriguing insights on how to give employees the right level of security at the right time (yes, there is such a thing as too many security controls!)
Hear directly from Claudio Bolla in this short highlights video:
Click to watch the full Cisco Umbrella Coffee Hour with INEOS.
