Learn how Genuine Parts Company, a global automotive and industrial parts distributor, worked with GuidePoint to fill security gaps and consolidate operations.
Customer Success Story: Genuine Parts
My name is Damian Apone and I’m the Global Security Program Director at Genuine Parts. We were founded in 1928. We are the global distributor of automotive and industrial parts servicing hundreds of thousands of customers across 14 countries. We have approximately 50,000 employees with endpoints numbering close to 200,000 globally including servers and workstations. We use a variety of cloud environments from hybrid to ensure as well as approximately 20 data centers across the globe. We have a central Enterprise Security Program team based in Atlanta, Georgia. We also have extended our reach outwards to each of the regions, Asia Pacific, Europe and North America to have local security teams as well.
One of the challenges that we faced in terms of consolidating the enterprise security team globally, has been shifting from a holding company mindset to an operating company mindset. So each of our subsidiaries are accustomed to making decisions autonomously. The biggest transition has been to get them to come under centralized and standardized leadership.
When we first met GuidePoint Security, they came in and helped us formulate our strategy and our approach. They took the time to understand what our requirements were and how things were working with our current provider. They gave us a roadmap to implement to help gain better visibility.
GuidePoint separates themselves from the rest because they’re a true partner of Genuine Parts. They came in and partnered with us. They’ve worked to understood our environment at great lengths to help us identify problems and they bring solutions to the problems that are in the best interest for Genuine Parts.
They differ substantially because most vendors only care about selling something. GuidePoint is taking that long term personal relationship and partnership approach, which we value greatly at Genuine Parts. They helped take the lead and filled in some of the gaps that we had on our team. So as a small security organization, we don’t have the full bandwidth of skill sets. GuidePoint was able to bring to bear experts in some of these areas to help us fill in the blanks and make it easier for us instead.
And they have the background and the experience. Whereas some of our team members didn’t. So it was a tremendous help to us. We wanted to focus on finding partners, not vendors. Partners, that offered multiple services. For us, GuidePoint is always just a phone call away or an email away to getting access to the people that we need. So we’re very fortunate that way.
And the value of the partnership continues to be illustrated time and time again. We’ve engaged with them and brought resources to bear at their own expense when we’ve said we have areas of our program that we want to investigate. GuidePoint brings in their company experts to walk us through putting together a proposal to partner with us to improve our cyber maturity and to improve our compliance.
By listening and understanding Genuine Parts and having the resources on staff with the expertise to bear working in partnership to provide solutions that will benefit and help mature our security long term.
I think that when we look forward into the future, it’s important a to find a partner who has all the services we need because there’s efficiencies that we’re starting to realize. We can go to a single provider, get better orchestration between the tools and the services that we’re in consuming, and that is true success and true partnership.
Genuine Parts needed to shift its security approach from a mindset focused on autonomous subsidiaries to a consolidated global security model with consistent levels of protection, tools, software, standards and policies. With 50,000 employees and customers in 14 countries, as well as 200,000 endpoints and 20 data centers around the world, Genuine Parts turned to GuidePoint Security to help them formulate their strategy and approach. From supporting a complex global operating environment to filling key cybersecurity skill gaps, Genuine Parts wanted to improve overall security and have confidence that their business was protected from global threats.
In this video, hear how the Genuine Part’s Global Security Program Director, Damian Apone, worked with GuidePoint Security to:
Damian Apone says:
“The value of the partnership continues to be illustrated time and time again. We've engaged with GuidePoint, which has brought at their own expense resources to bear when we said we have areas of our program that we want to investigate. GuidePoint took it on themselves to bring in their company experts to walk us through, put together a proposal, and partner with us to improve our cyber maturity to improve our compliance. And so by listening and understanding and having the resources on staff with the expertise to bear, working in partnership to provide solutions that will benefit and help mature GPC’s security long term.”
