CybergymIEC Fast Facts:
Global partners:
Japan, Australia, Lithuania, Sweden, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Croatia, N. Macedonia
Years in operation:
10+
Graduate trainees:
50K+
About CybergymIEC
In the rapidly evolving and changing high-stakes world of cyber security, the last time you want to find yourself learning about how to properly defend your organization is when you are actually under serious attack. It’s critical that enterprise cyber security teams are properly trained and prepared to respond quickly and capably to any attack.
CybergymIEC is a cyber-warfare readiness training program for governmental and private enterprises which is unique in emphasizing the importance of hardening the weakest link in any emergency response system – the people who run it. The program protects against cyber threats through individually tailored training delivered in a dedicated cyber training and technologies arena. Levels of training range from basic security best practices to expert incident response and forensics.
CybergymIEC is a joint venture of Cyber Control and the Israel Electric Corporation. Cyber Control is Israel’s leading cybersecurity consultancy, established by ex-Israeli Security Agency operatives and security experts, and the Israel Electric Corporation is a 7.7 billion USD company that faces countless cyberattacks on a daily basis.
The Connectivity Challenge for Security
CybergymIEC has a unique approach to cyber security training. Unlike other training providers that rely on “black box” simulators, CybergymIEC’s Arenas are real-world environments consisting of complex, wide-spread systems and sensitive infrastructures that are subjected to controlled, real-time attacks. In the CybergymIEC readiness training program, there are three teams. The red team is the attack force, composed of CybergymIEC’s own staff of expert white-hat hackers.
The white team is composed of CybergymIEC moderators and teachers, who manage and advise the trainees- the blue team. While trainees can elect to come to CybergymIEC’s main training center, CybergymIEC also has “hybrid arenas” in multiple locations worldwide. In these hybrid environments, the trainees connect to the infrastructure under attack through remote desktop (RDP) sessions.
When CybergymIEC launched a new hybrid arena environment in a new location that was geographically distant from their base location in Israel, they were immediately faced with a rash of RDP disconnections. On average, each trainee was experiencing 10 disconnections during a single day’s session. CybergymIEC was only able to reliably run one to two sessions simultaneously before the rate of disconnects spiked, making it untenable for their ten-student class size. Of course, this resulted in a very poor user experience, particularly because the training environment demands absolute concentration and fast response. This left CybergymIEC at risk of customer churn, and unable to execute on their plan to expand their business globally until a solution was found.
The CybergymIEC team, led by VP of Professional Services Yaron Laufer, immediately set out to find a solution to this critical problem, which was impacting the company’s expansion plans. As Mr. Laufer describes it, they “worked hard and fast to find a solution that could dramatically improve the user experience, and dramatically decrease the disconnections, between the hybrid arena and the arena in Israel”. While improvement in RDP performance was the primary driver, there were three other important considerations:
- The solution had to be able to be deployed very quickly. Any delay came with customer retention risks and forced a day-for-day slip in their future expansion plans.
- The solution would ideally not add to CybergymIEC’s management burden, introduce additional points of failure, or create vendor lock-in. The preferred solution, then, would not require any hardware or software on CybergymIEC’s premises.
- The selected vendor needed to demonstrate a high level of responsiveness and deliver outstanding support. CybergymIEC found that Teridion’s cloud WAN service was an ideal fit for their requirements.
“Teridion’s AI Network as a Service gives us the full confidence to expand our service anywhere in the world. We are about to open another arena, and I know that I can commit to reliability and a good user experience without any network concerns.”
Yaron Laufer, VP Professional Services, CybergymIEC
Teridion’s Solution: WAN Acceleration
Teridion provides an enterprise WAN service built on the public cloud. The service delivers the performance, reliability, and SLA assurance of legacy circuit-based networks across standard broadband connections. On top of great performance, Teridion adds the advantages you expect from cloud-based services: lightning-fast setup, global coverage, unbounded bandwidth and horizontal scale.
- Secure, accelerated, SLA-backed site-to-site performance
- Superior low-loss, low-latency routing for voice and video and reliable, stable, high-capacity RDP/VDI performance
- Fast, consistent access to enterprise SaaS applications
- High-performance access to cloud workloads running in any cloud provider
Results of Integrating Teridion Network
Teridion created and deployed CybergymIEC’s network within a day of the project initiation. CybergymIEC’s deployment responsibilities were simple: they created IPSec connections from their CheckPoint R80.10 at their Israel location and their CheckPoint R70 at the remote hybrid arena to the Teridion edge. CybergymIEC saw immediate, dramatic improvements in the overall performance of RDP sessions. Prior to Teridion, a class of ten trainees would commonly experience more than forty RDP disconnects in a day. Teridion’s Network as a Service effectively eliminated the disconnects. Since Teridion is continually self-optimizing, changing routes to use the best available path in real time based on global Internet performance, CybergymIEC has seen completely consistent improvements in RDP performance and reliability over the duration of the service.
With Teridion, CybergymIEC is well-positioned to continue to expand their presence worldwide with full confidence in their ability to deliver a great user experience for the next generation of cyber defenders.