WestJet Taps Intellitactics

RESTON, Va. -- Intellitactics, Inc. announced that Calgary-based WestJet, Canada's leading low-fare airline offering scheduled service throughout North America, has selected Intellitactics™ Security Manager along with Intellitactics™ SAM (security dashboard that works with Security Manager) as the centerpiece of its enterprise security management strategy. WestJet delivers a broad range of security services to the enterprise and Security Manager will be used to automate processes for security operations to accelerate security incident resolution and simplify reporting for audit and decision support.

Security Manager and SAM will be integrated with WestJet’s security management architecture to specifically centralize logging of network activity and automate the monitoring and analysis of events from security devices to stop attacks and protect information assets. With the solution’s real-time access to prioritized security alerts, WestJet will be able to take immediate action on incidents posing the greatest risk to the organization.

Intellitactics SAM will be configured to display practical security assurance metrics™ reflecting WestJet’s operational costs, risks, and security control performance. With these metrics, WestJet will be able to measure the value of security investments and provide key performance indicators to justify security budgets, assign accountability, and provide business context for decision making.

WestJet, celebrating its tenth anniversary, has grown to quickly become the second largest airline in Canada. WestJet deploys 61 Boeing next-generation aircraft supported by 5,000 employees to offer scheduled service to 33 cities in Canada and the United States, as well as charter operations to more than 20 cities in the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean.

“WestJet has been experiencing tremendous growth, which has driven the need for increased investments in security technology,” explains Bruce Elliott, WestJet’s senior manager of IT Security. “We spent the last five years building out our infrastructure, installing multi-layer firewalls, and bringing our anti-virus, anti-spam, and intrusion detection software up-to-date. We are now running in the region of 700 servers in three different locations. Between our security applications, e-mail, Windows applications, servers, and network traffic, we can easily generate between 60 to 80 MB of data a day. Ninety percent of data generated is what we call noise. What I worry about is the 10 percent that has the potential to cause tremendous damage to the business. Without an automated solution, it’s impossible to collect this data from the various sources, analyze the events, and then escalate the high-impact alerts – the important 10 percent - in order to take action.”

Intellitactics Inc.