The Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises (MNGE) is owned and operated by the Muskogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma, the fourth largest tribe in the U.S. with over 100,000 citizens. A critical contributor to the tribe’s economic prosperity, MNGE offers diverse entertainment and recreational amenities at its twelve locations, from electronic gaming and traditional casinos to fine dining and live concerts.
IT Security Manager Seth McLaughlin coordinates with multiple crossfunctional technical teams to secure MNGE’s sophisticated network, critical data, and gaming infrastructure. MNGE relies on VMware vSphere cloud computing and server virtualization platform for its digital framework. This unified, centralized environment consolidates the physical computing assets and Virtual Machines (VMs) that power internal operations and casinos to ensure business continuity in a fast-moving, high-stakes industry.
The Challenge
Looking to bolster the organization’s resilience, McLaughlin collaborated withthe CIO to find ways to incorporate AI and machine learning into MNGE’s cybersecurity strategy. Their goal was to improve asset control and exposure management by gaining visibility across the entire estate. The primary focus was on reducing risk and shrinking the attack surface by uncovering security gaps and taking action to ensure the latest protection and prioritize remediation for business-critical vulnerabilities.
McLaughlin was already aware of the cloud-based, AI-powered Armis Centrix™ platform and was eager to test it out in the MNGE environment with a proof of value.
“What really convinced me to move forward with a POV was the agentless, passive asset identification of assets and deep packet inspection provided by Armis. This would give us a level of visibility we never had before,” he explained. “Our existing vulnerability scanner worked fine for scanning assets we already knew about. But if a new VLAN were to pop up on the network that the security team wasn’t aware of, our solution would never see or scan the devices con-necting to it.”
Continue reading to learn how Armis Centrix™ quickly proved its value by eliminating blind spots, discovering more than missed 10,000 assets and has been instrumental in strengthening MNGE’s overall security posture.
Challenges
-
Expanding visibility into assets and security status enterprise-wide -
Pinpointing and mitigating the riskiest vulnerabilities
-
Sharing data across technical teams for faster, more efficient remediation response
Results
-
Surfaced 10,000 assets missed by traditional vulnerability scanning software -
Reduced time spent on manual processes with automated ticket routing to correct teams
-
Inspected traffic to ensure general user access only to authorized AI apps
-
Can detect vulnerabilities 2 weeks faster than before
-
10+ hours a month saved on average by quickly scoping vulnerability exposure with advanced search capabilities
