Santillana Latam Safeguards Its Employees and Learners With Unified Security Management

INDUSTRY
Education

HEADQUARTERS
Madrid, Spain

COMPANY SIZE
1,000 – 5,000 employees

OVERVIEW

For over 60 years, Grupo Santillana has
been promoting K-12 education through the
development of books, literacy and vocational
training materials, and children’s books in Latin
America.

CHALLENGE

OUR SOLUTION

Grupo Santillana’s small security team oversees a large, distributed IT infrastructure. Its 2,200 servers and
6,500 user workstations support the company’s 3,300 employees and 5.5 million users in almost all of Latin
America. Hordes of educational data and records traverse the company’s network every day. “It is essential
for us to provide security to our employees, company assets and users — who are predominantly children,”
said Rodrigo Nalda, global chief information security officer at Santillana Latam. “The level of security
required for the data stored is exceptionally high.”

“We have greatly improved with Check Point’s
technology, especially because of the visibility it
gives us and how it anticipates anomalous behaviors
in our network, allowing us to take preventative
measures against damages.
Rodrigo Nalda, Global Chief Information Security Officer, Santillana Latam

Early in his tenure, the group migrated its legacy IT architecture to a multi-cloud environment, moving
internal services to Azure and business services to AWS. To keep up with his diverse architecture’s security
demands, such as access control, patch management, configurations and data governance, Nalda needed a
unified solution to manage network, endpoint and multi-cloud security. “The aim was to standardize security
to simplify its administration, and to have a single point of control, visibility and monitoring,” he said.

SOLUTION

After evaluating several security vendors, Nalda opted for the Check Point Infinity Enterprise License
Agreement. Infinity’s subscription model allows his team to easily scale its security products and hardware in
real time to support Santillana’s growing digital footprint. As a foundational element of Santillana’s defense-in-depth strategy, the security team leverages Check Point Quantum Security Gateways (on-premises
firewalls) and Check Point CloudGuard Network Security for advanced, automated threat prevention across
the group’s networks and multi-clouds. ”We use Check Point services because they give us all the layers that
a next-generation firewall provides — with incredible results,” said Nalda.

With CloudGuard, Nalda can quickly configure a box with just a couple clicks and perform a comprehensive
vulnerability assessment when a virtual machine or server goes live in the cloud. In addition, his team
uses the solution’s Agentless Workload Posture (AWP) tool to quickly remediate exposed secrets,
misconfigurations, malware and other vulnerabilities — without impacting performance. “The portal
generates alerts and a risk-index classification, allowing our team to solve any problems identified by the
AWP tool,” said Nalda. “This increases the security level of our servers and prevents us from falling behind.”

With Check Point Infinity’s consolidated security architecture, Nalda’s visibility extends well beyond networks
and clouds. The Check Point Harmony suite, which includes the Email & Collaboration, Mobile and Endpoint
products, protects the group’s distributed workforce from malicious content and business compromise
attempts — no matter how they’re logging on. “Harmony Mobile gave us a very efficient security layer within
the company, especially for our senior executives, who receive the most attacks,” said Nalda. The security
team accesses findings from Harmony and the rest of the Check Point architecture by logging into the Check
Point Infinity Portal. The unified platform gives Nalda and his team a centralized view of all activity across
Santillana’s digital environment, simplifying policy management and accelerating response to critical events.

For a CISO, it is very comfortable to know that if
I have a problem, I can count on a team that will
help me. This is a very important value that not all
manufacturers provide.

Rodrigo Nalda, Global Chief Information Security Officer, Santillana Latam

OUTCOME

Since onboarding Check Point, Santillana has simplified its security workflows and reduced its exposure
significantly. For Nalda, the volume of attacks his team has intercepted with the help of the Check Point stack
speaks for itself — from CEO impersonation attempts to malicious apps installed on unmanaged devices.
“We are still frequently targeted, but now, the attacks aren’t successful.” With seamless, unified management
across the security stack, the team can respond quickly to unauthorized access attempts. “We have greatly
improved with Check Point’s technology, especially because of the visibility it gives us and how it anticipates
anomalous behaviors in our network, allowing us to take preventative measures against damages.”

When a machine is launched in the cloud, Nalda can use CloudGuard to immediately understand its security
posture and remediate any misconfigurations or security gaps. “With just two clicks, we can see the level of
exposure of a machine that has just been set up with a new service,” he said. Setting up Harmony Email &
Collaboration, which is also essential to providing Santillana’s employees with secure connectivity, was just
as easy. “It was a five-minute integration, and our entire Office 365 package was automatically protected,”
said Nalda. “In one hour, we were already seeing that all these emails that used to get through were being
stopped. It was the most visible change in the shortest time.”

While Santillana has made drastic improvements to its security posture with Check Point, Nalda knows his
team must continuously hone its defensive tactics to keep pace with evolving threats. With Check Point’s
products and dedicated customer service team on his side, he is confident in his ability to meet security
objectives quickly — without going through extensive procurement processes, thanks to their Infinity contract.
“Check Point has a highly professional service team that guarantees the quality of its products,” he said. “For
a CISO, it is very comfortable to know that if I have a problem, I can count on a team that will help me. This is
a very important value that not all manufacturers provide.”

ABOUT SANTILLANA LATAM

Santillana is the leading educational company in Latin America, with more than 60 years of experience and
activity in 19 countries. In an environment of digital and pedagogical transformation, in addition to taking
care of the quality and innovation of all its contents, it offers schools, teachers, families and students a
more comprehensive service, which incorporates technology, training and advice. The company has a strong
commitment to the 2030 Agenda and acts as a transformative agent in education, helping to create better life
opportunities for millions of students.