The Village Roadshow security team secures over 100 million digital interactions per year and a large environment of nearly 10,000 devices on its network. Its legacy infrastructure burdened the company, while monitoring multiple, disconnected tools led to inefficiencies, an increased risk of errors, and slow incident response.
- Outdated security infrastructure was unable to counter modern-day threats.
- Network needed an overhaul to scale to a larger, single-vendor SASE solution for improved security and networking.
- Lack of centralized log management visibility and vendor fragmentation across 17 different tools.
- No SOC automation made manual correlation from disparate, siloed systems time-consuming, inefficient, and error prone.
"Managing overlapping technologies and multiple security and networking tools with limited resources and no unified dashboard for log correlation created a daily challenge. Considering our technology involves life-critical aspects like ride sensors, protecting our systems with best-in-class technologies is of paramount importance."
– Arul Arogyanathan
Group Chief Information Officer, Village Roadshow
AI-driven platform approach with single-pane-of-glass visibility
The call for consolidating the company’s security tools was clear. Village Roadshow started its platformization journey by deploying Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Hardware Firewalls (NGFWs) at 33 sites. Group Chief Information Officer, Arul Arogyanathan, emphasizes how Village Roadshow considers reputation as fundamental to customer trust. He underscores that Palo Alto Networks position as a leader in cybersecurity made it the best-suited partner for Village Roadshow’s platformization journey.
Village Roadshow chose Palo Alto Networks network security, deploying Prisma Access and Prisma SD-WAN (Prisma SASE) and Prisma Browser. The company realized the tremendous value of this solution in terms of a stronger security posture, time and cost savings, as well as a consistent user experience.
SOC modernization was next. After establishing a proof of value, Village Roadshow turned to the AI-driven security operations platform, Cortex XSIAM®, while also partnering with Unit 42® for Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and its proactive services.
Path to platformization
Network security
Hardware Firewalls
Prisma SASE
- Prisma SD-WAN
- Prisma Access
Secure AI adoption
Prisma Browser
SOC modernization
Cortex XSIAM
Incident response
Unit 42 MDR
Unit 42 Retainer
Unit 42 Proactive Services
Achieving unparalleled cost and time savings with platformization
Enabling agility and innovation with Prisma SASE
Transforming the SOC with Cortex XSIAM and Unit 42
Vendor consolidation with integrated SecOps
Vendor consolidation with integrated SecOps Village Roadshow deployed Cortex XSIAM in just two months, unifying XDR with security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), attack surface management (ASM), and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions into a single, integrated, AI-driven platform. In doing so, the company slashed the number of vendors from five to one, accelerated threat remediation, and simplified operations by centralizing data from various security tools.
Achieving quantifiable value expeditiously
Cortex XSIAM enabled Village Roadshow to consolidate tools, automate processes, and improve analytics, delivering a rapid cost reduction of 23%. This platform also accelerated Village Roadshow’s ability to develop and deliver results quickly, effectively doubling its speed to market. The company’s security has since shifted from a human-first, reactive approach to an autonomous model powered by AI and machine learning. It has freed up 500 work hours per month, reduced 1,400 cases into 20 issues, and achieved a 2-minute median time to resolution."We’re now able to respond to incidents on other platforms directly from XSIAM. Our automated playbooks can also interact with users—validating impossible travel alerts or notifying them of containment actions in real time."
– Keyur Lavingia
Head of Cyber Security, Village Roadshow
Taking a proactive approach
As part of the XSIAM deployment, Village Roadshow onboarded Unit 42 MDR. Keyur Lavingia, Head of Security says the MDR service “ensures 24/7 monitoring of the SOC, allowing our team to focus on high security tasks.” He also mentions that it has lowered the mean time to respond (MTTR) by nearly 6x to less than 5 minutes.
The security team also partnered with Unit 42 on proactive assessments using retainer credits. “It was very important for us to have an experienced retainer,” Arogyanathan elaborates, “not just for incident response but also from a proactive threat intelligence perspective.” He further notes that the Unit 42 Tabletop Exercise provided vital insights to the board and paid dividends to the business.
Future-ready network security
With Prisma SASE and hardware firewalls, Village Roadshow can launch any digital service to enhance guest experience with no concerns that security could be compromised. According to Lavingia, Prisma SASE has improved business significantly in terms of agility and speed to deploy. It has also helped the organization gain a stronger security posture and a seamless user experience regardless of staff members’ locations.
Village Roadshow has realized cost savings by consolidating to a single vendor with a complete SASE solution and by phasing out two incumbent vendors. The company has also stacked up time savings in excess of 5,000 work hours every month, enabling the security team to focus on more value-added tasks instead of dealing with unexpected outages, managing multiple vendors, and solving interoperability challenges. Additionally, Prisma SASE ensures a zero trust approach on device posture, user behavior, and application behavior for users connecting to any application.
Recognising that the modern enterprise browser is now a major data exchange point, Arogyanathan and his team have also implemented Prisma Browser from Palo Alto Networks, which integrates with its SASE (secure access service edge) platform and neutralizes threats directly within the browser. This solution provides browser-native malware protection, phishing prevention, and visibility into encrypted traffic. It also enables safe adoption of GenAI tools by securing information flow within the browser and enforcing zero trust policies, secure remote access, and bring-your-own device (BYOD) policies within the organization.
"Prisma Browser has our everyday AI covered, protecting our IP, while at the same time enabling users to leverage the power of AI."
– Arul Arogyanathan
Group Chief Information Officer, Village Roadshow
Future-ready network security with AI
Since the inception of GenAI, browsers are among the most critical enterprise applications that can help unlock enterprise data. Arogyanathan elaborates, saying, “As thought leaders, we understand that the average corporate employee interacts with the browser at least 300 to 400 times per day, making browsers a gateway for data exfiltration. Most leaders would rely solely only on tighter control. However, at Village Roadshow, we opted for smarter guardrails and governance through Prisma Browser.”
Prisma Browser provides malware protection, data loss prevention (DLP) and phishing protection, as well as eliminating shadow AI. This all happens directly in the browser, while enabling visibility into all traffic, even when it’s encrypted. The solution also protects users on applications, like ChatGPT and other conversational AI tools, as information that passes through the browser is now visible to the Village Roadshow security team.
Reshaping cybersecurity through platformization
As a platformized customer across the Palo Alto Networks technology stack, Village Roadshow has gained the advantage of complete security transformation, operational efficiency, and cost optimization, while ensuring that its brand reputation is secure.
Share this story
