LaBella Associates secures critical infrastructure and improves IT management with ManageEngine solutions

Business challenges: Building a secure, scalable IT foundation

LaBella Associates faced numerous IT challenges but sought a solution that would meet its current and future needs. Among its concerns:

Handling critical infrastructure data

Given its work with energy infrastructure companies, LaBella manages critical energy infrastructure information, a category of highly sensitive data that demands stringent security measures. Ensuring the protection of this information was and continues to be a top priority.

Limited log management

With 32 distributed physical sites, manually collecting and analyzing event logs became unmanageable. Without automation, it was impossible to monitor logs effectively as the volume of data grew.

Tarnished systems and manual efforts

Before implementing ManageEngine solutions, the IT and security teams faced challenges with disjointed systems, from help desk operations to endpoint management, making day-to-day operations inefficient and time-consuming.

How ManageEngine empowered LaBella Associates to automate, secure, and scale

LaBella Associates sought an affordable yet powerful solution that would provide the organization with log management, endpoint control, help desk management, security monitoring, and UEBA capabilities. The organization chose ManageEngine's suite of products, including Endpoint Central, ServiceDesk Plus, ADManager Plus, ADAudit Plus, Log360, and EventLog Analyzer to accomplish its objectives, and enable it to address its growth plans and today's evolving IT infrastructure needs.

Enhanced security monitoring

LaBella implemented a distributed EventLog Analyzer setup, with one centralized server and five distributed nodes across critical data collection points. This architecture enabled to collect, consolidate, and analyze logs from firewalls, servers, and endpoints across all locations.

By leveraging Log360’s UEBA capabilities, LaBella could monitor unusual activities and receive alerts for critical events, such as unauthorized group membership changes or suspicious VPN login attempts. This proactive monitoring was essential in quickly detecting and mitigating risks before they impacted operations.

Optimized endpoint management and IT support

With nearly 2,000 employees at LaBella Associates, managing patches, software updates, and IT support requests was a massive task. Endpoint Central became its primary tool for endpoint management—enabling it to streamline configuration deployments, remote troubleshooting, inventory tracking, and patch management.

“Compared to what we used before, accessing and managing users' computers is now seamless. Pushing updates, managing patches—it's all much more efficient,” notes Jaden Robideau, cloud services administrator at LaBella Associates.

ServiceDesk Plus transformed help desk operations at LaBella Associates by integrating seamlessly with Endpoint Central. The support team can now create tickets via email, automatically capture accurate user and asset information through Active Directory integration, and take direct action on endpoints from within the ticket itself, such as deploying patches or running scripts.

Seamless automation and reporting

ManageEngine automated many of the organizations processes that were previously performed manually, such as log analysis, reporting on sensitive data access, and tracking Active Directory changes. The LaBella Associates IT team now receives regular reports on file system modifications, group membership updates, and user activities which is crucial for security and audit compliance.

ADSelfService Plus empowers users to reset their own passwords securely without contacting IT, saving the LaBella Associates support team significant time and effort, especially during password expiration cycles.

Real-world impact: Strengthening security and meeting compliance needs

LaBella Associates’ security operations team now relies heavily on ManageEngine's solutions to monitor and safeguard its network.

• Real-time threat detection: Using UEBA, the IT team swiftly identifies and responds to unusual spikes in VPN login attempts, and fine-tunes strategies to defend its infrastructure more effectively.
• Compliance readiness: Automated log collection and reporting simplify its ability to meet stringent customer-driven security requirements without manual data assembly.
• Operational efficiency: Integrations across ManageEngine products, from ServiceDesk Plus to Endpoint Central, make daily IT tasks faster, easier, and more reliable.

“Ease of use, incredible support, and tight integration between products, those are the three biggest reasons we continue to choose ManageEngine. Every need we’ve had has been met, and support has been phenomenal,”Donald Hess, security operations manager at LaBella Associates stated.

About Log360

Log360 is a unified SIEM solution with integrated DLP and CASB capabilities that detects, prioritizes, investigates and responds to security threats. Vigil IQ, the solution's TDIR module, combines threat intelligence, an analytical Incident Workbench, ML-based anomaly detection and rule-based attack detection techniques to detect sophisticated attacks, and it offers an incident management console for effectively remediating detected threats. Log360 provides holistic security visibility across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid networks with its intuitive and advanced security analytics and monitoring capabilities. For more information about Log360, visit manageengine.com/log-management/ and follow the LinkedIn page for regular updates.