Exela Pharma Sciences Leverages Reco to Reduce its Attack Surface Area and Manage Risk

Exela Pharma Sciences, an award-winning US-based integrated specialty pharmaceutical company, leveraging Reco to protect its confidential pharmaceutical data, such as patented medication recipes and dosage information. Exela utilizes core SaaS applications such as Veeva CRM and Veeva Vault, Microsoft 365 (M365), and SAP on a daily basis to support its business operations.

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During a time of rapid growth, the Exela security team was struggling to keep up with all the identities and applications that were being added to the corporate infrastructure. Initially relying on ingesting logs from Microsoft into its SIEM solution to gain visibility into its M365 environment proved to be an exhaustive effort, and was quickly abandoned.

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To keep the company safe from damaging breaches, Exela needed a solution that would provide insight into what was being deployed, who was accessing what, and what permissions existed. Exela signed up with Reco to help.

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Utilizing the Reco platform, Exela Pharma Sciences was able to:

• Reduce risk. They identified and managed risk around 218 shadow applications. They also remediated misconfigurations, for example they removed stale accounts that were several years old, added MFA to accounts that did not have it, and changed passwords for users who shared their corporate credentials in SaaS apps.
• Decrease configuration drift. They worked with Customer Success to build automations that enforce security policies and reduce drifts from baseline.
• Enable visibility and observability. The team now has visibility into the complex web of identities, apps, and permissions across its SaaS ecosystem. By sending high and critical alerts through the SIEM to the Security team, SaaS risks can be addressed immediately, reducing corporate exposure.
• Protect unique apps: Reco offers coverage for the Veeva suite, and quickly rolled out support for FreshService, Exela's niche ITSM app, in under a week.
• Validate SSO and MFA: Reco identified dozens of apps that were not configured with SSO or MFA enforcement. Exela used Reco to remediate this and validate progress within the platform.

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“Now that we use Reco we’ve reduced our attack surface area and we have the tools we need to deprovision SaaS and also change passwords for users who share their corporate credentials in SaaS applications.We have reduced both the stress and the risk that comes with our business growth because we have a handle on what’s happening across our SaaS deployments and our technology users,” says Ansari. 

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Read the full customer story of Reco and Exela Pharma Sciences to learn more.