Customer perspective: Five Questions with Essilor
Essilor is the world leader for corrective lenses with offices in over 100 countries. In line with their mission to “improve lives by improving sight,” the company develops a wide range of lenses to correct and protect eyesight, from design to manufacturing.
With 55,000 employees, 22 manufacturing plants and 400 laboratories globally, the IT infrastructure landscape comprised eight data centers worldwide. Essilor aimed to modernize its data centers and transition from a physical to a virtual environment in order to reduce cost, increase efficiency and boost performance. After the transition, 80 percent of Essilor’s landscape is now virtualized on VMware, deploying approximately 5,000 virtual machines (VM) globally.
Tanweer Surve, Director IT Infrastructure Shared Services, Essilor, discussed with Trend Micro his company’s business challenges, evaluation process, benefits achieved and lessons learned.
Trend Micro (TM): Transitioning to a virtualized environment, what where your main challenges from a business perspective?
Tanweer Surve (TS): During our transition, a critical area we initially overlooked was “virtualization-aware security,” or a solution that can protect our data centers during the entire move to the cloud. Additionally, traditional security products are typically very resource intensive—they don’t fit the virtual and cloud world. We also needed to ensure the solution we picked met our compliance requirements, such as HIPAA and PCI. Because we were virtualizing mission critical workloads and also considering the cloud for hybrid deployments, the evaluation of risk management and compliance management was a top priority for us.
TM: What did your evaluation process for security solutions look like?
TS: When looking for solutions, we wanted a product that integrated seamlessly with our vCenter and enhanced our virtualization investments. The product needed to be easy to use and truly flexible to meet our goal. We were looking for a seamless, automated deployment process that had minimal impacts on our VMs. Once installed, we needed a proactive system that would flag potential concerns and protect the entire system as a whole—physical, virtual, and cloud.
TM: Can you tell us about the benefits you achieved?
TS: After weighing multiple options, we selected Trend Micro’s Deep Security platform. The investment was completely justified and resulted in excellent, measureable ROI. We saw substantial productivity and performance gains, with a significant reduction in potential risk. The IT team also highly valued the single platform and centralized dashboard, which resulted in a considerable reduction in administrative overhead, including reporting to help with PCI and HIPAA compliance.
TM: Many organizations are thinking of starting the journey to the cloud or have just started it. Do you have any lessons learned or recommendations to share?
TS: Often times, IT departments rely on traditional end-point security solutions to secure their virtual environments. However, I highly recommend not trying to integrate a legacy solution with a modern data center. Instead, invest in a virtualization-aware security solution to secure virtualized endpoints and servers in the data center and/or cloud. Security designed for virtual and cloud is more scalable, efficient and easier to manage than legacy approaches. Finally, make sure you have a clear vision and strategy for your transition process from beginning to end – and don’t neglect security.
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