Kildare County Council is the authority responsible for local government in County Kildare. The council is responsible for housing and community, roads and transportation, urban planning and development, amenity and culture, and environment. The council has more than 1000 employees.
Paradyn, an Irish-owned technology company provides IT services, including managed IT, cybersecurity, cloud solutions, and connectivity services to Kildare County Council.
The IT Challenge
In the face of ever-evolving cyber threats, Kildare County Council needed ongoing threat monitoring and remediation in its IT network to reduce cyber risk for the organisation and to relieve pressure on its internal IT team. Kildare County Council required a solution that would mitigate cyberattacks and the costs associated with recovering from such an attack.
The organisation also needed to decrease the number of helpdesk tickets being raised by employees for routine IT tasks such as user account unlocks and password resets.
The Solution
Following extensive consultation, Paradyn delivered a tailored security information and event management (SIEM) solution – ManageEngine Log360 – to Kildare County Council.
The solution monitors network activity and detects threats trying to penetrate the network across areas including servers, endpoints, firewalls, the Office 365 environment, and Active Directory.
A security operations centre (SOC) service was also deployed to provide 24x7x365 monitoring and remediation of potential threats within the Council.
In addition, Paradyn implemented ManageEngine ADSelfService which enables over 700 employees to carry out their own account unlocks and password resets. The tool also supports 20 administration accounts for server multi-factor authentication (MFA) logins.
The Outcome
- Round-the-clock monitoring by Pradyn's security analysts and SOC engineers has created a more secure IT environment for Kildare County Council which, in turn, is enhancing the vital services it provides to almost 250,000 citizens in Kildare.
- The SIEM and SOC services have vastly reduced the risk of a successful cyberattack or data breach for the organisation which is protecting sensitive data for the Council’s employees and the citizens it serves.
- Approximately 200 million events are processed by the SIEM on a weekly basis, which gives peace of mind that activities across the infrastructure are being continually monitored (including out-of-hours) and reduces the risk of burnout for the IT team.
- In addition, ADSelfService allows end users to unlock accounts and reset passwords on demand without the need to engage IT support technicians.
- This reduces the number of helpdesk tickets raised and, in turn, reduces the time (and associated costs) that support technicians spend carrying out these basic but time-consuming functions.
- Monthly review meetings are held to maintain SIEM and SOC reporting standards and Paradyn carries out ongoing software support and maintenance for the Council.
- The organisation has also scaled up its use of the SIEM solution, adding more log events and increasing the number of systems being monitored as it continues to expand.
Log360
Log360 is your central solution for all log management and network security challenges. The integrated solution brings ADAudit Plus , EventLog Analyzer , M365 Manager Plus , Exchange Reporter Plus and Cloud Security Plus together in a single console to make it easier for you to control your network. With Log360 you have everything at a glance from the changes in the Active Directory and the log files of the network devices to the Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Exchange Online and the Azure Active Directory to the public cloud infrastructure.
