to Protect its Complex Network of Smart City and Legacy Technology
The city of San Diego has chosen Tenable to provide improved security visibility and reduced threat exposure across its complex, citywide network.
As the eighth largest U.S. city with nearly 1.4 million residents, the city of San Diego’s diverse and geographically dispersed IT ecosystem comprises 24 discrete networks across more than 40 departments. Ranging from parks and recreation, and public safety to transportation and public works, many departments operate network connected point of sale terminals and require Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance audits. The city’s sprawling enterprise IT environment combines old and new technologies, including legacy applications and programs like PowerBuilder and intelligent smart city devices such as LED street lights and GPS sensors for trash collection.
“One of the challenges I faced when I came on board three years ago was that the IT department had very little visibility and no adequate toolset available to properly assess and manage the security risk of the city’s vast network,” said Gary Hayslip, deputy director and chief information security officer, department of IT, city of San Diego. “Having worked with Tenable during my time with the Department of Defense, I knew we needed a tool that could provide a unified view of security and enable us to assess the overall risk environment without interrupting the city’s business services.”
Unique sensors and advanced analytics from Tenable enabled the city of San Diego to run vulnerability assessments that inventoried network traffic, and identified misconfigured devices and missing or outdated patches in real time. This gave the security team a comprehensive view of the city’s security posture. In addition to improved security visibility and prioritization, Tenable solutions helped Hayslip save the city more than $1.3 million per year in lost productivity.
“In a city that experiences around a million cyberattacks a day, having that continuous visibility across a distributed enterprise network is critical, and Tenable helped us significantly reduce our threat exposure,” said Hayslip. “We went from an average of 200 infected machines per month, which was costing us around $600 a machine in lost productivity, to an average of 35. Not only does that save our IT department time and money, but it also allowed us to build a flexible, streamlined security program that reduces the city’s attack surface.”
