Dairy Gold

Dairygold's suppliers were diversifying into higher-value markets, which brought greater risk to both product and raw materials. The business had already invested in best-of-breed security technologies over time, but that investment sat across disconnected platforms with no way to compartmentalise the information coming in. This meant Dairygold's team spent time chasing leads that turned out not to be significant, instead of focusing on what actually mattered.

The environment itself added complexity: alongside a typical Windows estate, Dairygold operates industrial control systems, SCADA and operational technology across its network, all of which needed visibility.

Within three months of the project starting, Dairygold had actionable information flowing through to remediation, giving the team confidence they were more secure than before.

Gap: no quantified before/after metrics (response times, true/false positive rates, incident counts) exist in the source material for Dairygold, unlike Trivium. This stays qualitative until real numbers are supplied.

Dairygold is a dairy processor and co-operative, owned by its farmer members. The business takes milk from its suppliers and processes it into a range of products exported to markets worldwide, with production facilities across Ireland and the UK and sales offices in Spain, Germany and China.

Dairygold implemented IBM QRadar as its SIEM platform and IBM BigFix for patch and inventory management, with Smarttech247 running the deployment and ongoing monitoring. The BigFix integration into QRadar extended visibility into endpoint security data in real time, including across the industrial control system and SCADA environment, so that OT feeds could be assessed as a potential attack vector into the wider enterprise network.

Smarttech247 worked with Dairygold's architects to identify which feeds mattered most and prioritise those into QRadar first, rather than ingesting everything at once. False positive elimination has continued as an ongoing joint effort between Dairygold, IBM and the Smarttech247 team.

"Smarttech247 provide around-the-clock monitoring alongside a vast amount of knowledge and experience of deploying and monitoring organisations with similarly distributed architectures to Dairygold. They maintained their focus from the sales cycle right through deployment, and it was a seamless process."