Teck Resources: A Major North American Mining Company Saves Time and Resources Defending Against Cyberattacks with Trellix XDR

By Trellix · May, 6 2022

As one of Canada's leading mining companies, Alberta-based Teck Resources delivers copper, zinc, and steelmaking coal to customers through its presence in 50 countries worldwide. With over 8,300 full-time employees and recognition as one of Canada's top 100 employers of 2022, its focus on caring for people and communities extends to ensuring safety in all areas of production, especially cybersecurity – which impacts everything from information integrity to operational continuity and Teck Resources’ international reputation.

Client challenges: From data overloads to integration obstacles

"Today, attacks are happening so fast that, if we have to wait for a human to intervene, we’re too late. The damage has already occurred."

The company’s practice has been to deploy best-in-breed cybersecurity points solutions. The challenge with this approach has been figuring out “how to get these solutions to play well together,” notes Rob Labbé, its Director of Information Security. “I really needed to take the pile of alerts and volumes of data we were getting and turn these into meaningful information – not just with respect to visibility but also actionability.” Though he set out to find a network security product, he and his team were intrigued by Trellix’s broader offering. “The features that caught our attention,” he said, “included Trellix’s ability to (1) bring in quality intelligence from outside, (2) allow us to contribute intelligence back to the community and, most importantly, (3) initiate defensive action automatically during attacks, without waiting for one of my team members to manually intervene.”

Trellix’s solution: Machine-speed defenses against machine-speed attacks

Trellix transformed Teck's security operations and reduced its analysts’ workloads. “Trellix’s emerging XDR platform components accelerated our constant ‘race to contain’ and helped us ‘catch up’ with attacks,” Labbé says. “We were able to reduce intervention from hours to seconds or less. That’s the difference between cleaning up one computer, rather than thousands. In short, Trellix helped us mount machine-speed defenses against machine-speed attacks.” Trellix also pulled in outside intelligence, analyzed this data, then packaged information that helped Labbé and his team quickly make effective decisions.

Value: Impacts on our operations

“If I had to try to knit that together myself, even if I could to the equivalent, it would take a massive investment in time, a lot of development, and a slew of false-positives. We don't have the time for that, and, honestly, that shouldn't be my job.” In summary, what does Labbé value most about Trellix? “One, Trellix helps us reduce our ‘time to contain’,” he explains, “mostly because the solution does so much work for us. Two, Trellix dramatically shortens our ‘time to decision’ – based on how its XDR components take so much work off our back. Finally, Trellix is open to a real two-way partnership with us, rather than the transactional relationships I have encountered with so many vendors.” Labbé agrees he is pleased. “Their team takes the time to understand my priorities as well as those of our business – and they provide helpful guidance along with their solutions. This is the kind of partnership in a cybersecurity vendor that I need to address today’s attacks while preparing to address those of tomorrow.”

View the case study here.