Customer Success Story: Intelsat

Customer Success Story: Intelsat

I’m Vinit Duggal, the CISO here at Intelsat and have been here for about 20 years. For those that don’t know what Intelsat does, we connect the unconnected. We connect a network of satellite and terrestrial facilities to broadcast the world’s largest high-definition music event in history and serve  some of the largest broadcasters in the world to uplink signal to their customers.

We are connecting the maritime industry, commercial aviation and business aviation. And we have a variety of government services that we facilitate as well. It’s a pretty diverse security dynamic. We fly satellites for a living. So how we fly those assets and the security countermeasures and policies that we use to manage that environment is completely different than, for example, our service provider backbone. That’s how we bring those services to market.

We’re looking at availability on that side. We’re looking at ensuring the integrity of those services on that side. And at the same time we have a private network where we fly our satellite assets and how we secure that is different.

And then the third paradigm is that we have our business assets that we have to secure and lock down. Most traditional companies have to deal with one, maybe two of those different types of environments. But we have to deal with all three.

We’ve been working with GuidePoint Security for over a decade now and we’ve used various advisory services from GuidePoint. We’ve used Assessment services, Pen Testing, services, GRC services, Incident Response services and we’ve had certain issues on the technology side of the house.

GuidePoint helped us navigate in a pretty complex sort of tools’ landscape that’s out there to find solutions. For us, they’ve been able to know our environment really well. They’ve been able to meld with my team and really help us focus on the tools that are going to help us fulfill our mission.

GuidePoint put a lot of effort into learning Intelsat. They got to know our people, they got to know our mission. They got to know our customers and understood all of these things before they even sold us anything. They understood what our goals were and then they overlaid that with their guidance on how they can help us.

All of this takes time. It’s not something that’s quick. They cultivated relationships, they’ve got our trust, not just with my senior leadership team, but also with the guys that are on the ground doing the work.

Everyone looks at GuidePoint as a partner, not as a vendor. For example, we had a SIM tool that was on the ground for over a decade. And we knew we weren’t getting the value out of it that we thought we should have been. It wasn’t the centerpiece of our program as most SIM tools should be. So what we did was we partnered with GuidePoint to bring in staff auxiliary services to help us really look at that tool and figure out if it’s the right solution for Intelsat.

Those staffing services brought in a level of expertise that we did not know we needed. And it really changed how we implemented that tool, how that tool really drove value through the rest of Intelsat. It has helped us enhance our security operations, the fidelity of the data that we’re getting out of the system is really crisp and clear. It allows Intelsat to take very, very quick action on incidents that are being stemmed from it. So it’s become the centerpiece of Intelsat. And that’s has a lot to do with what GuidePoint brought to the table and how integrated with our team.

With GuidePoint’s Advisory services, we’ve been able to take extremely complex issues and really simplify the messaging. That’s kind of one of their specialties. And if you really look at what we’re dealing with and how we communicate that out to various parties–whether it’s the C-suite, whether it’s our customers, whether it’s internal users who help strengthen security awareness, you’re not going to be able to just throw a lot of technical lingo at them. For them to understand it, we have to really frame the stories and GuidePoint has really been has been an integral part in helping us tell those stories so people can consume them and then react the right way.

I would argue we have one of the best security programs in the satellite operator space. I think GuidePoint has been pivotal in helping us get there. They’ve been a great partner. They’ve taken the time to understand Intelsat and they’ve taken the time to understand our customers. And that’s helped drive value through the program. They’ve become part of the Intelsat family.