How Hollywood Bowl Secures Expanding Networks with a Microsoft-First Strategy

“Every business ultimately faces the same challenge. Business continuity. We all need to continue trading. But turn on the news and you’re going to see a breach reported somewhere. It’s a constant in the headlines. We’re seeing businesses completely crippled and nobody wants to be the next cautionary tale.”

Legacy systems, siloed IT and an expanding network meant Hollywood Bowl was potentially losing control. With 80 tenpin bowling centres in the UK and the acquisition of Canadian bowling business Splitsville to secure, protecting the organisation’s expanding environment was a challenge.

“I don’t want to feature on the 10 o’ clock news and I’d certainly like to keep my job,” explained Hollywood Bowl’s Head of IT Security, Dan Burborough, when we sat down at InfoSecurity Europe to discuss the mid-market security landscape, evolving challenges and how to secure an expanding attack surface.

“Every time a new bowling centre comes on board, that’s a new slice of the network. New endpoints, new cloud services and more team members. The attack surface increases all the time and threats are constantly evolving. We needed a way to bring all our systems into one holistic view so we could regain oversight, control and ultimately better protect our infrastructure.”

Our fireside chat took a candid look at the challenges Hollywood Bowl faces in securing its expanding network and how a Microsoft-first approach is measuring up.

Watch the full 30-minute conversation I had with Dan. It’s an authentic look at the current challenges in securing multi-site organisations and why a Microsoft-first approach is working well for Hollywood Bowl.

Tackling Evolving Threats in a Fragmented IT Landscape

Hollywood Bowl was dealing with independent solutions that didn’t talk to each other, manual patching and third-party support that left the organisation fragmented and exposed. The lack of control meant the company was unable to verify its own environment and a decision had to be made. Should it continue on that path, stitching together solutions with no real correlation or oversight, or was it time to pivot to a new strategy and embrace a more modern way of working?

“You can’t protect what you can’t detect. Essentially, we had lost control. We needed eyes-on everything, in real-time to protect our systems around the clock.” — Dan Burborough, Head of IT Security, Hollywood Bowl

Riding the Microsoft Train: Security, Simplicity and Smarter Spend

As a self-proclaimed Microsoft fanboy, Dan looked to move away from isolated solutions to a Microsoft-first approach which aligned with the firm’s wider objectives.

Identities, devices, data and cloud environments all in one ecosystem enables Hollywood Bowl to understand the complete story of an attack. With a single pane of glass, threat detection and response are no longer fragmented. They’re integrated, streamlined and actionable in one place.

“But isn’t a Microsoft-first approach a more expensive path to take?” I asked.

“It’s about smart utilisation,” replied Dan.“Risk reduction balanced with cost reduction. You need to maximise your licenses effectively. By partnering with Softwerx we’ve been able to make our security tools work more efficiently in an ecosystem that we can control around the clock.”

So what’s next for Hollywood Bowl? Dan fully intends to ride the Microsoft train, unlocking more potential through Purview to truly understand the company’s data, getting to grips with DLP and leveraging eDiscovery. It’s all about making the most of what they already have and following the Microsoft roadmap.

“Security is a heartbeat. A continuous evolution. And we fully intend to evolve with Microsoft,” concluded Dan.

Don’t miss this exciting conversation into how Hollywood Bowl and Softwerx are working together to secure the organisation’s expanding network in a time of increasing threat complexity. Watch the full 30-minute video here.