When Burns & McDonnell, a 121-year-old construction and engineering firm, chose to call its new consultancy arm 1898 & Co., it was honoring the company’s long history of helping clients realize their vision of the future. Just as Burns & McDonnell helps clients build physical infrastructures, 1898 & Co. helps clients build digital infrastructures. Today, the company uses Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Conformity to provide the global visibility, security, and confidence its clients need.

1898 & Co. provides services to customers in critical infrastructure industries such as energy, utilities, food processing, and hospitals—areas that often have strict compliance obligations and require strong cybersecurity protections. Because many of these customers are long-established companies, adopting new technologies, like the cloud, can be challenging. “Our customers have a multitude of compliance and security challenges, so we require a good baseline of security. We need to be able to convey how we’re protecting their data and make sure they are fully safeguarded,” says Jason Cradit, principal cloud architect, 1898 & Co.

1898 & Co. must also provide strong security for its own IT environments. When Cradit joined 1898 & Co. in April 2020, as part of the organization’s Cloud Center of Excellence, he needed to quickly assess and secure his team’s workloads in the cloud—fixing any security blind spots and reducing costs. 1898 & Co. operates with a multi-cloud environment that includes primarily Amazon Web Services (AWS), but also Microsoft^® Azure^® and Google Cloud Platform™.

Cradit had tested Conformity at his previous company and knew it could not only alert his team to security issues that needed to be addressed, but it could also help them tackle those issues. “During the Conformity POC, we quickly identified areas that we could take immediate action on. It gave us a quick hit list we used to reduce costs. The one-click remediation capability demonstrated value and made the buying decision easier,” says Cradit.

Trend Micro’s dedication to continuous innovation in cloud security on AWS played a role in the buying decision. “Trend Micro and AWS continue to innovate together to bring new features and integrations to customers. We know our customers want the latest and greatest from AWS, and Trend Micro helps us to help them hold up their end of the shared responsibility model,” says Cradit.

1898 & Co. is currently running Conformity on AWS and its other clouds to improve security, drive efficiencies, and reduce costs. “AWS has a great Well-Architected Framework, and Conformity really complements it, because it tells us how to do things. It builds on the AWS tool and tells us how to remediate the findings in one dashboard, so everyone can see that it was done,” says Cradit.

“Conformity is more than just a security tool. It provides me with situational awareness by giving me a global view of everything that I have inside my cloud—helping me manage it and take action. Conformity lets us make the most of the significant capabilities of AWS by providing best practices and compliance configuration flags and rules,” says Cradit.

"Conformity is more than just a security tool. It provides me with situational awareness by giving me a global view of everything that I have inside my cloud—helping me manage it and take action."

Jason Cradit
Principal Cloud Architect, 1898 & Co.

Once Conformity was installed, Cradit showed his management team a list of threats and misconfigurations that he was able to address immediately. “We saved a ton of money in the first month. Even better, those cost savings will continue every month,” says Cradit. “Our bill was reduced by 15%.”

Meanwhile, Conformity will provide Cradit with confidence in his cloud environment, support customer compliance, and increase maturity within Cradit’s internal IT team. “We can get more employees involved in remediation, which helps them grow professionally. Conformity provides real hands-on experience and is a great learning and education tool,” says Cradit.

As the company continues to grow, Cradit says he plans to expand the relationship with Trend Micro, and is looking at bringing on both Trend Micro™ Deep Security™ and Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Workload Security in the near future. “Conformity is helping us secure our use of the cloud. The next step is securing our use cases themselves — that’s where Deep Security will come in. And as we provide IoT and managed services to the market, we need to be equally as secure. We’re already looking to add additional Conformity licenses, as well as expanding into Workload Security,” says Cradit.