Layla

Laya Healthcare is the second largest private medical insurance provider in Ireland, protecting the insurance needs of over half a million members. As part of the AIG Group since 2015, Laya handles vast quantities of sensitive medical and financial data across public-facing web servers, internal infrastructure, virtualisation, hardware and network layers, with new systems installed every quarter.

The core problem was volume without correlation. Firewalls, web firewalls and servers generated an enormous amount of security event data, but Laya had no reliable way to tell whether an event on one system was connected to an event on another, and no internal resourcing model that could scale headcount every time a new system came online. Leadership wanted a solution that was straightforward to deploy, could handle large data volumes, and gave real-time visibility into the organisation's overall risk and security posture.

Laya evaluated technologies against Gartner's Magic Quadrant before beginning conversations with Smarttech247, who could provide the IBM QRadar SIEM platform. Initial implementation took about three months, with visibility building progressively rather than switching on all at once: as each part of the infrastructure was understood, issues were remediated and QRadar re-checked to confirm the fix.

The outcome was twofold. At a business level, Laya's leadership gained confidence that the right level of protection was in place across the network and infrastructure. At a technical level, the team gained visibility into security event logs that had previously been too voluminous to stay on top of.

Laya Healthcare operates from Dublin and Cork, offering healthcare insurance coverage built around member education and long-term wellbeing, backed by AIG's global reach across 100 countries and over 90 million customers.

Smarttech247 first engaged with Laya in an advisory capacity, unpaid guidance on the right technology and the right way to implement it, before Laya moved forward with QRadar. The SIEM identifies sophisticated attacks through advanced correlation, drives vulnerability management through QVM, and consolidates multiple security feeds, antivirus, IPS/IDS and APT technologies, into a single pane of glass for real-time security intelligence. This let Laya's team stop chasing disconnected logs and focus on the core business instead.