Customer Story
ULTA Beauty Securely Scales High-Growth e-Commerce Operation in the Cloud with ExtraHop
Unified visibility across work streams as well as security and network teams
Reduced false positive alerts for more efficient security operations
Accelerated migration of production work streams to Google Cloud
The Beginning
Their Move to Google Cloud Kicks Off
With more than 1,200 stores, Ulta prides itself on delivering exceptional guest experiences in-store, online, and with its loyalty program that boasts 30 million members and growing.
To support this fast growth without compromising guest experiences, Ulta started migrating its e-commerce platform to Google Cloud. While this offered greater scale, it also increased complexity and introduced opacity.
"We are always working to wow our guests, and from our team's perspective, it's all about protecting that guest," said Brown. "As our network grew, we found we lacked the visibility we needed to detect and respond to breaches and attacks."
The real value in ExtraHop Reveal(x) is the time we see returned to our engineers so they can focus on the things that matter, like projects, strategic initiatives, and — most importantly — innovation.
Diane Brown
Chief Information Security Officer,
Ulta Beauty
The Transformation
Ulta Defends the Front-Lines of the Cloud
For Ulta, visibility meant more than just tools that provided insight into one part of the retail environment. The team needed a way to detect, investigate, and respond to threats and performance degradations across the entire network, from on-premises data centers to store locations, and increasingly into Google Cloud workloads. For that, Ulta Beauty turned to ExtraHop Reveal(x).
"We partnered with ExtraHop to help us build a strong, first-line defense for our monitoring capabilities—at any user level," says Jeff Ybarra, Senior IT Manager of Network & Security for Ulta.
The Outcome
Giving the Team New Visibility and Efficiency
Improving Cross-Functional Alignment and Efficiency
To scale resources and improve security posture, Ulta merged its security and network teams. "Networking and security are so interrelated," said Brown. "It made sense for us to bring the two teams together into what we now call the 'secure network operations center' or the 'SNOC.'"
With Reveal(x), the SNOC team allows both network engineers and security analysts to rely on the same source of insight and visibility across the environment.
But it's not just alignment across teams. ExtraHop also provides high-fidelity, contextual alerts to keep teams focused on what matters. "The real value in ExtraHop Reveal(x) is the time we see returned to our engineers," said Brown. "That means they can focus on the things that matter, like projects, strategic initiatives, and — most importantly — innovation."
Unparalleled Cloud Visibility
For the team at Ulta Beauty, the visibility, detection, and response capabilities in Reveal(x) provide unparalleled visibility into the security and performance of cloud workloads. Through native integration with Google Cloud Packet Mirroring and ExtraHop's cloud-scale machine learning, Reveal(x) gives the Ulta team the ability to rapidly identify and secure new workloads, spot misconfigurations, and detect threat activity as well as quickly investigate and resolve incidents.
"Before ExtraHop, we had limited visibility into what was going on in the cloud, but with Reveal(x), we can quickly identify vulnerabilities and exploits and understand how our applications are performing in the cloud," said John Kreis, Senior IT Engineer.
"The technology is really helping us accelerate adoption of the cloud by ensuring our workloads are secure," added Kreis.