Industry
IT services and consulting (enterprise ERP and cloud)
Employees
750+ professionals across the USA and Hyderabad, India
Region
Georgia, USA
TrendAI Vision One™ capabilities:
Server and Workload Protection (SWP), Identity Security
TrendAI Vision One™ services:
Managed Detection and Response (MDR), Threat Intelligence
TrendAI Vision One™ solutions:
THE CHALLENGE
Securing a multi-tenant cloud estate where one provider’s blind spot becomes every client’s risk
Sierra-Cedar runs the back-office machinery that large institutions cannot afford to lose. An Oracle partner and AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Sierra-Cedar delivers consulting, managed services, and hosting for Oracle Cloud, ERP, human capital management (HCM), and PeopleSoft environments across higher education, public sector, healthcare, and commercial clients. A team of more than 750 professionals work across the United States and India, with its largest management environments supporting organizations with more than 40,000 employees, 450,000 students, and 31,000 concurrent users. In this business, reputation carries the company. “If you do not have a good reputation, it is hard to get into this market,” says VP of Security at Sierra-Cedar, Robert Miller.
That reputation rests on a hard problem. Sierra-Cedar hosts client systems on AWS under a shared-responsibility model, where customers hold their own root accounts, control access, and bring third-party tools the security team neither patches nor owns. Miller runs a seven-person team on a follow-the-sun rotation across two continents. The math is unforgiving, with seven analysts, dozens of client accounts, and a threat pace that keeps climbing as AI turns phishing into clean, hard-to-spot messages. What the team needed was correlation and a single place where an alert carried the context from every other tool, rather than firing on its own. “One alert would fire, and without context from the other tools, we were chasing ourselves,” says Miller. He went looking for a platform that could give his team a single view instead of six.
“We wanted account-level posture we could act on before anything reached a client. That is the standard this team holds itself to.”
Robert Miller
Vice President, Corporate Security, Sierra-Cedar
THE SOLUTION
One platform replaces a stack of disconnected tools with a single, correlated view
Sierra-Cedar moved its security to TrendAI Vision One™ when it migrated from the data center into AWS, choosing the platform for its AWS compatibility and support for the many Linux kernel versions the company runs. A single TrendAI Vision One™ agent now does the work of several tools at once. The console pulls in Active Directory (AD) visibility and third-party vulnerability data, and TrendAI™ Flex credits let the team allocate security capacity dynamically across a large, multi-tenant environment. Because licensing runs through AWS Marketplace, each client account bills separately, giving Sierra-Cedar clean per-client transparency.
“We wanted one place that correlates the signal into alerts my team can use, instead of six that do not talk to each other,” says Miller. “One agent does endpoint security, EDR, integrity monitoring, intrusion prevention, and application control. That is five tools I am not stacking on a hosted server and five consoles my analysts are not switching between.”
One posture view across every client account
With clients spread across many AWS accounts, Sierra-Cedar needed a single vantage point across them all. Cloud security posture management (CSPM) and identity coverage gave the team visibility, surfacing misconfigurations and exposures before they turned into incidents, and tightening governance over who holds access in a shared-responsibility world. Integrations with AD, Microsoft Entra ID, AWS accounts, Splunk, and TAXII threat feeds feed the same console, so the picture stays whole. That single view is what lets the team govern access and close exposure across accounts it does not own outright.
“The posture view across our AWS accounts lets us put things in place before they become an issue,” says Miller. “Our clients hold their own root accounts and bring their own tools, so I need to see access and misconfiguration across all of it from one place. Without that, you are governing blind.”
A lean team extended by managed detection
Sierra-Cedar layered TrendAI Vision One™ Services – Managed Detection and Response (MDR) on top of the follow-the-sun rotation. The MDR team covers the nights, weekends, and shift handoffs that the rotation could not, and on high and critical alerts, it triages first and emails what it has already reviewed. “MDR is a second set of eyes and real expertise,” says Miller. “On the critical alerts, they have already looked at it before it reaches us. That goes a long way.”
We were running tool after tool, and none of them talked to each other. Now one console correlates the signal, and my team acts on it.”
Vice President, Corporate Security, Sierra-Cedar
Robert Miller
RESULTS
How a seven-person team covers a multi-tenant estate around the clock
The team works from one console. Correlation runs on its own, turning raw signal into alerts the team can act on, and consolidation removes the hand-stitching across products that used to eat up the day. The MDR pre-triage trims the noise that drives alert fatigue. “My analysts open one console, and the incident is right there, with the context attached,” says Miller. “Data is quick and at our fingertips. We analyze faster, we pull forensics on demand, and we move faster. We are not stitching events together by hand anymore.”
The strategic gains followed. Folding five tools into one agent removed the licensing sprawl and the performance risk of stacking competing products on hosted servers, a real concern when an outage can dent the firm’s reputation. Posture and identity coverage let the team run governance across accounts, and AWS Marketplace billing provides clients with account-level accounting of what they pay. AI security and zero trust sit on the roadmap as the next layer. “That consolidation made a real difference to how we cover the estate,” says Miller. “I am running a seven-person team against dozens of client accounts. Every tool I can retire and every alert I do not have to chase by hand is capacity I put back on the work that protects our clients.”
CUSTOMER SERVICE AS A DIFFERENTIATOR
Named technical account managers who answer when a zero-day hits
For a lean team securing other organizations’ most critical systems, a solid vendor relationship is a necessity. Sierra-Cedar works with a primary and secondary technical account manager on a biweekly cadence. They run training, walk through unfamiliar alerts, and route zero-day questions to the right product managers fast. “I can count on the team responsible for my company,” says Miller. “With other vendors, I cannot say that. I have a level of ease knowing that if there is an issue, I can actually talk to someone.”
That confidence extends to where the platform is headed. AI has collapsed the time between an attacker’s idea and a working tool from weeks to minutes, and Sierra-Cedar leans on TrendAI™ to defend its estate and to find the shadow AI tools surfacing across it. The AI-native partnerships TrendAI™ has with Anthropic, NVIDIA, and AWS signal a platform built to keep that pace. “AI took attacks from weeks to minutes,” says Miller. “I need a partner whose AI keeps pace, and I rely on TrendAI™ to flag the AI tools showing up in our environment before they become a gap.”
ABOUT TRENDAI™
TrendAI™, the global AI security leader and enterprise business unit of Trend Micro, empowers organizations with full AI visibility and consolidated security that inspires confidence, drives innovation, and eliminates risk. Trusted by the largest enterprises and governments across 185 countries, TrendAI™ secures the entire organization, from identities to infrastructure to data.
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