How the Mix Buffet Group strengthened its cybersecurity with the PROVE IT bastion from Rubycat ?

With more than 2,000 employees, Mix Buffet is a family-owned Breton company based in Morbihan and Ille-et-Vilaine.

Mix Buffet specialises in ready-to-eat meals (deli salads, pizzas and burgers, snacking salads and sandwiches), appetisers (canapés, verrines, Préfou, mini burgers and spreads...) and hot starters (quiches, vol-au-vents...).

The family-owned food group chose the PROVE IT PAM ssolution to manage and track privileged account activity across their information system.

Claude Charpentier, Group IT Services Director, and Florian Girardin, IT Security Manager, explain the reasons behind their choice.

What were Mix Buffet's cybersecurity needs?

Our group has grown significantly in recent years. We have acquired new sites and production units, and modernised and digitised our tools and processes across a multi-site organisation. A real challenge for our IT team, which has also expanded to support this growth.

Beyond the desire to protect ourselves against the daily threats posed by hackers and to safeguard our information system, we wanted greater control over the many third-party providers who remotely access our tools, machines and resources to carry out repairs, updates and maintenance.

What strategy was adopted and what actions were put in place?

Six years ago, we assessed our infrastructure through a penetration test to audit our IT security, identify vulnerabilities and implement more advanced protective measures. This led to our IT security strategy, which involved putting in place a number of initiatives, including :

• An EDR solution
• Network segmentation based on the principle of least privilege
• A PAM solution 

The latter is, for us, an essential building block!

We wanted to completely rethink the way we manage and oversee privileged accounts.

Why did you need to strengthen the traceability of sensitive access and actions on privileged accounts ?

As mentioned earlier, digitalisation within our sector — the food industry — is growing, and remote interventions by partners are increasingly frequent.

Our objectives in implementing an administration bastion were to:

• Monitor the actions and interventions of our partners
• Record sessions during their interventions
• Segment and restrict access for these third parties
• Have proof of their actions

In short, we wanted to control and track our partners' actions.

Before discovering Rubycat, we tested a competing administration bastion solution for several months, which proved too complex to deploy and manage. It was over-specified in terms of features relative to our needs. Furthermore, the licensing model was poorly suited to our organisation and would quickly have become too costly given our group's growth.

Why did you choose Rubycat and its PROVE IT solution?

Guided by our partner APIXIT and on their recommendation, we met with the teams at Rennes-based publisher Rubycat. The PROVE IT solution immediately stood out. For us, it ticked every box: simple to deploy and administer, and highly effective! On top of that, Rubycat is based in Rennes, and we enjoy working with local players. But there is more:

• After-sales support, although we rarely need to contact them, is highly responsive and proactive.
• The solution's documentation is comprehensive, even if we rarely refer to it, the solution is that intuitive.
• Rubycat's licensing model suits us very well, as it is based on the number of simultaneous sessions rather than the number of users.
• All internal and external users now go through the PAM solution, enabling strong passwords on privileged accounts to be stored securely in a secondary credentials vault.
• We manage access policies by applying MFA to all resources using Active Directory accounts. This means that when a staff member leaves or a provider changes, it is simply a matter of deleting the user's account from Active Directory. Our users no longer need to know the passwords for privileged accounts, which greatly simplifies the management and protection of these accounts.
• Finally, the PROVE IT administration portal sends event notifications by user and by resource. We have real-time visibility into activity on our information system and can view, or replay, ongoing sessions. This is key to maintaining control, investigating potential issues and responding swiftly.

Would you recommend our solution?

Yes, and we already have 😉

After more than four years of using PROVE IT, we are just as satisfied as ever! The product continues to evolve, and that is great news for our IT team, our growth, and the management of access to our sensitive resources.

Testimonial collected on 9 February 2024