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For almost 50 years, Mirvac has been one of Australia’s foremost property investment and development businesses.
With over 1500 staff and revenues exceeding $500M, the company is a world leader in the property industry. A big part of Mirvac’s future is smart buildings, driven by the increased use of IoT (Internet of Things) devices.
For the last five years, Mirvac has worked closely with Tesserent, part of Australia’s largest cybersecurity company, to ensure systems are safe. This means effectively managing cyber risk around business assets.
The Problem: Measuring Threats and Vulnerabilities
Mirvac first engaged Tesserent, previously known as Pure Security, in 2015 to get an independent view of their threat and vulnerability management program. The initial business case was to get assurance that the Mirvac team was focusing on, and optimising, efforts correctly and had the right protection and safeguards in place for all assets.
“We wanted to be sure the controls we have around our technical vulnerabilities were sound and that our people were fully aware of the environment we operate within.”
“We took a proactive approach and we’re thankful that we did. It’s been a very thorough and valuable engagement”, explains Mr Vine.
The Solution: Customised Testing and Reporting
Tesserent has continued to be a trusted Mirvac partner, delivering a wide range of services including penetration testing, web app testing, internal testing, physical security testing, third-party testing, and infrastructure testing.
Tesserent has customised the testing and reporting to ensure the activities with Mirvac deliver the greatest possible value and insights.
“We rely on Tesserent to be an independent voice when we need to verify that we have the right controls in place for a given asset or environment, whether we set them, or they come from a third party,” explains Mr Vine.
This included penetration testing cloud services during the pre-onboarding phase. Tesserent conducts infrastructure tests to prove these services in order to get an understanding of, and reduce technical exposure, before they have any chance of hosting assets important to the Mirvac business. This has become an important step in the program Mirvac manages.
Success and Benefits
Mr Vine highlights that Mirvac has sound visibility into technical vulnerabilities and great insight into a number of best practice areas through the program of work with Tesserent. This includes developing secure applications, ensuring cloud services meet security requirements and better threat assessment and mitigation.
“Tesserent’s expertise has assisted shaping our expectations of service providers in relation to secure coding practices. Their methodology of application testing is well structured, and the value of this testing is evident in the feedback we receive from them. This then leads to much more efficient efforts around attack surface reduction”, adds Mr Vine.
With Tesserent, Mirvac gets far more detail than previously possible, and is now empowered with a superior view of not just the risks but also importantly what can be done to mitigate them. “We definitely have more assurance about where our data is going to sit and the availability of the service to the business”, he adds.
Mirvac’s greater visibility of risks has enabled the company to prioritise its resources and explain how the technical risks translate into business risk, enabling the technology and senior leadership teams to be well- informed.
The Future
The partnership between Mirvac and Tesserent has been successful, according to Mr Vine, largely because Tesserent has responded so quickly and efficiently to requests. The reports have given Mirvac great visibility of potential issues, and remedial actions have been articulated clearly and concisely.
“This translates into less business risk for us”, explains Mr Vine.
Tesserent’s relationship with Mirvac has delivered significant benefits and the relationship is set to expand as Mirvac grows its technology footprint through the integration of IoT devices to ensure it’s ready for all the challenges of the smart building revolution and beyond.
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