Security teams quickly uncover key insights buried in data overload
Executives can quickly see what threats require more investment to keep the organization and its customers safe
SecOps are more effective and efficient at focusing on evolving threats posed by AI misuse
Box advances its already robust content and workflow protection by using Tableau Pulse to automatically surface security data insights, enabling its security organization to optimize its response to evolving threats posed by AI misuse.
About the Company
Box is the gold standard in secure, intelligent content management. Founded with the goal of making it easy to access information and collaborate with anyone, anywhere, enterprises choose Box for its security, compliance, neutrality, and advanced content management capabilities.
Security is a data problem; no matter the solution used there is so much data. Security specialists shouldn’t burn hours on data analytics or reporting when we can use automation and AI to do it for us. Tableau Pulse surfaces insights faster enabling our teams to spend their time fighting active threats.
The Challenge
Scaling security operations to meet evolving threats from AI misuse
The number one goal at Box is to provide the most trusted and secure intelligent content management platform, as it operates in some of the most tightly regulated industries globally. Box powers 115K+ organizations, including 67% of the Fortune 500, as well as law enforcement organizations, financial institutions, healthcare providers, universities and well-known brands. It is trusted by customers for its security and compliance.
Like any organization, it is fighting increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity threats from bad actors employing AI tools and facing escalated risks. To meet them head on, Box is working to advance its security team’s response times and proactively make Box continuously secured.
Its security strategy is all data-driven with the Global Security team capturing the essential minutia of data, which has both benefits and challenges. For example, one challenge is how to take all of the raw data and surface relevant and actionable insights so people can make strategic data-driven decisions needed to stay ahead of cyber threats.
Box lists three challenging areas:
- Complex data presentation: hinders quick identification and extraction of key insights
- Lack of instant metric assessment: makes it difficult to identify success and areas for focus
- Need for timely insights: lack of live, centralized, up-to-date information slows actions
More than anything else, security is a data problem. It doesn’t matter what solutions are used, there is simply so much data that it can paralyze Security Operations teams and pull resources in non-optimal directions.
Consequently, Box has evaluated how it can surface data and insights faster and present a single source of truth around incidents and vulnerabilities to enable its Global Security team to be laser focused in its response.
Box wanted a solution that would have the most impact for the least investment of time, choosing to leverage Tableau Pulse to automate and scale personalized, contextual, and AI-powered insights.
How Tableau Helps
Driving strategic clarity and operational precision
Maintaining security means knowing if you are facing a threat and minimizing how long it takes to contain that threat. These metrics of Mean Time to Respond, to Triage and to Contain (MTTR, MTTT, MTTC) are part of Box’s service level agreements (SLAs) with its customers and something the company reviews constantly.
Box’s Security team would present scorecards to the board with the data presented visually by charts. But understanding what the metrics indicate can be complex. A security specialist can see the data and make a determination of what’s good or bad, but it might not be as immediately clear to a less-technical or busy director or executive.
Tableau Pulse immediately shows what the Security team’s response times are, so that leadership can clearly see how they relate to SLAs, and provides a comparison to previous moments in time, to show if the response times are tracking up or down. Pulse also gives clarity and context to threats, providing clear insight into areas to watch.
The CEO, CISO, and team leads can easily interrogate the data and dig deeper from strategic or tactical perspectives, identifying what threats require more investment, where investment can be pulled back, how the team is performing—and ultimately how Box helps keep the organization and its customers safe.
Enabling near real-time insights and saving time
Over the last two decades, Box has proven to be a disruptor in the content services platform industry, solving the need for streamlined, secure access to corporate content.
As a cloud-first company and early pioneer, it’s no surprise that Box’s internal data analytics team is already working with very sophisticated visualizations and reporting. But data volumes can be overwhelming, presenting too many dashboards and click-throughs for further detail.
Most teams have been using online spreadsheets to collate data for scorecards, but this presents two issues. First, the data is old as soon as it’s presented, and second, it takes each team member a lot of time and effort—often above and beyond their day-to-day work to pull all the data and charts together manually.
Powered by trusted AI, Tableau Pulse automates the process, creating metrics in minutes and at scale. This eliminates the need for teams to invest significant time in manually preparing scorecards and data visuals. Furthermore, it enables insights to be presented when needed, giving much more accurate views of status and without requiring heavy investment of time by the team to prepare scorecards and data visuals.
Teams have their time back to focus on keeping the organization secure while also being armed with the insights to make data-driven decisions on where to focus their energy, such as most likely areas of threat, where to train people and where to shift resources.
Solving the problem of data overload
Box’s robust security infrastructure, stringent privacy protocols, and comprehensive regulatory compliance framework enable it to securely manage diverse and sensitive data types, including medical, financial, legal, and confidential information, which many traditional providers struggle to accommodate. While these advanced security and compliance capabilities are fundamental to Box’s value proposition, they also necessitate that the company’s security organization process and analyze vast quantities of threat intelligence data.
Correlating, analyzing, mining, and reporting meaningful patterns in threat data is a challenging and time-consuming task spread across many tools. Tableau Pulse is poised to revolutionize this process by automatically identifying relationships and trends, performing in-depth analysis, and extracting valuable insights. This will further enable teams to quickly understand complex data, make informed decisions, and respond effectively to emerging threats and anomalies in real time. As a result, the global security organization enhances its comprehensive visibility across the entire security landscape, further empowering them to proactively contain and mitigate potential threads with even greater efficiency and speed. This advancement will allow Box to stay ahead of evolving cybersecurity challenges and maintain its position as a leader in secure, intelligent content management.
Every person within the Box security operation, from line managers to CISO, loves Tableau Pulse and wants more from it. And it’s all for the benefit of customers. One of the most important things our customers want is certainty that their data is safe. And the more we maximize the time of security professionals to focus on security, the more our customers can sleep easy.
The Tableau Difference
Bringing Tableau Pulse into Box has created more efficient global security operations and a stronger overall security posture because Pulse creates metrics in minutes and gives near real-time insights on threats and anomalies, powered by trusted AI. This drives strategic clarity for the security team, a better overview of operational performance, faster threat detection and accurate data-driven decision making.
Security specialists can focus their time and attention on protecting the organization and customers from cybersecurity threats, rather than burn hours analyzing metrics, reporting, and making crude data visualizations.
The Results
Box has been using Tableau Pulse within its global security operations and there’s a genuine love for how transformative the experience has been within the organization. So much so that the company is excited by the prospect of rolling it out into other areas of the business.
- 97% reduction in time to data insights, Tableau Pulse enables the team to drill down into the data and interrogate it, allowing Box to retrieve near real-time insights without the need for detailed upfront requirements.
- 92% reduction in time to prepare Monthly Operational and Quarterly Business Reviews. What used to take an hour now takes just five minutes, with simply copying and pasting from Tableau into PowerPoint.
- 99% reduction in time required to create monthly, quarterly, annual, and year-to-date visualizations. What once took hours over the course of days now takes seconds with Tableau Pulse.
- 99% expected reduction in time to manually compile reports for the CISO, as Tableau Pulse enables real-time access to the data and insights needed, streamlining decision-making and improving efficiency.