Summary: Market Rithm, an AI-first marketing technology company, reduced its attack surface and restricted access to its resources, apps, and systems with NordLayer.
Market Rithm is an innovative, AI-first marketing technology business. Operating on a hybrid model with a lot of remote workers, Market Rithm builds and manages tools for unifying email deployment, content management, and AI creation into one ecosystem.
Market Rithm manages a diverse client base—from small businesses to enterprises—using its own cloud infrastructure. The need for a safe infrastructure led the company to reevaluate how its remote developers access the backend environments. This is why they deployed NordLayer.
We sat down with Larry Ward, President of Market Rithm, and Larry Schulman, Chief Information Officer (CISO), to talk about how NordLayer helped restrict access to the company resources and reduce the attack surface, hiding private server entrances from the public internet.
Before NordLayer, Market Rithm had a standard server entrance, and some of its workloads were completely open to the public internet. This meant anyone could exploit them. Bad actors use automated bots to constantly scan the web for open ports and try to force their way into backend systems. CISO Larry Schulman knew this was a massive risk:
“The world is becoming more dangerous out there, and the less attack surface you have, the better off you are.”
At the same time, keeping the systems safe without a business VPN was challenging. The only alternative was manually allowlisting the constantly changing home IP addresses of its employees. Schulman realized that it was completely unmanageable.
“Managing and allowlisting our entire staff’s IP addresses manually was just not realistic.”
Following a recommendation from a trusted security consultant, Market Rithm turned to NordLayer, which provided one solution that replaced the need for multiple vendors and manual workflows. With NordLayer’s business virtual private network (VPN) and a cloud firewall, Market Rithm was able to automate its security.
The initial rollout of NordLayer was completed in a few days. The team experienced a few challenges with some workstations, which forced the CISO to implement custom firewall rules to ensure proper traffic routing.
Otherwise, the platform integrated seamlessly into its daily operations. This setup also allowed remote developers to connect securely to private cloud environments without any hassle.
“Our main goal in deploying NordLayer was just to enhance our security and decrease the attack surface. The combination of ease of installation, cloud firewall, business VPN, and just the whole feature package made the cut for us.”
By routing team access through NordLayer’s business VPN, Market Rithm successfully reduced the attack surface. Their server environment is now completely invisible to the internet, and remote employees can only view or interact with server entrances if they are first securely authenticated using multi-factor authentication (MFA).
“NordLayer allows me to sleep a little better at night, knowing that I don’t have important workloads open to the entire world anymore.”
NordLayer also allowed Market Rithm to get rid of the manual IP setup. Before, the CISO had to manually update the firewall rules every single time a remote worker’s home IP address changed. With NordLayer’s dedicated IP, this process is now completely automated.
“The only alternative to the level of security we have right now would be to play whack-a-mole with our team’s home and office IP addresses and allowlist them. With the number of people we have, the alternative is almost unmanageable.”
How IP allowlisting works
Market Rithm now has secure access to its internal web-based applications. They are hidden behind NordLayer’s business VPN.
The company’s CISO used NordLayer’s site-to-site secure connectivity features to establish encrypted tunnels to their private cloud environments. Now, the only traffic the NordLayer application actually sees is internal cloud network addresses. Because of this, the entire hybrid team connects to their cloud environments seamlessly and securely.
“We’ve got a handful of internal web applications that now sit behind the VPN. So instead of having only a login screen protecting our system from bad actors, the VPN hides the site from them.”
Creating a private gateway in NordLayer’s Control Panel
Market Rithm tailored NordLayer’s cloud firewall to maximize their new security framework. The company’s CISO configured the network access policies for better network visibility. By organizing users into distinct teams and implementing generalized internal access policies, Market Rithm maintains a trusted environment where staff can securely connect to necessary resources.
“Our developers connect through NordLayer and access our private cloud environments seamlessly.”
Organizing teams in NordLayer’s Control Panel
Market Rithm has been using NordLayer for two years now to effortlessly secure its infrastructure for a hybrid team. It proved to be a perfect fit by providing a flexible business VPN and cloud firewall that completely eliminated the need for manual admin work.
As Larry Ward, President of Market Rithm, sums it up:
“NordLayer prevents us from getting needlessly attacked, and that saves us a ton of money, obviously. While it isn’t completely quantifiable, avoiding a data breach is worth a massive amount to our business.”
Market Rithm’s President and CISO shared with us their tips for growing software companies looking to upgrade their defenses.
Market Rithm chose NordLayer to automate secure access and eliminate manual IP allowlisting. By hiding its server entrances from the public internet, NordLayer helped this AI-first company protect its infrastructure while saving IT admin time with automated security.
Ready to lock down your network like Market Rithm? Talk to our sales team or book a personalized demo today.
Joanna Krysińska
Senior Copywriter
Joanna's family has a history in math and engineering, and she has dedicated her life to simplifying complicated technical ideas. She helps people understand how hackers think and how to stay ahead of them by concentrating on the human side of cybersecurity.
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