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Mariner Wealth Advisors is built around delivering the financial services their clients need: from wealth management to insurance to tax planning. Their approach helps their clients simplify their lives and their financial planning. But safeguarding all the sensitive data that comes with delivering those services is anything but simple. Financial services companies remain a top target for threat actors. With the security of their clients and their business in mind, Mariner Wealth turned to Material to help stay one step ahead of attackers.
Streamlining Email Security Operations
As with most financial services organizations, Mariner Wealth sees frequent spear phishing attempts. Prior to partnering with Material, the process of working through a phishing incident using Microsoft 365’s built-in tooling would take hours. Waiting for indexing before being able to run searches, building queries in Powershell to find similar messages and senders, struggling to identify what was and wasn’t an actual incident or determine the magnitude–it was a long, drawn-out process.
“Before Material, we were spending several hours every day just monitoring, remediating and communicating with users,” said Thomas Brittain, Director of Infosec. “When we enabled automatic remediation with Material, we gained all that time back almost immediately.”
With Material’s Phishing Protection, Mariner gained not only automated response to user reported phishing emails, but the built-in detections to block those emails in the first place. “Material’s detections are doing a great job of catching phishing attempts before they reach our users–especially with high velocity attacks where thousands of messages are streaming in, it picks those out really well and takes a lot of workload off of us,” says Thomas.
Implementation and Support
Implementation was seamless, with full implementation completed within about a week of turn-on. Mariner’s helpdesk is usually buried with requests and questions when a new service is deployed, but in this case the team didn’t hear a single complaint. But when the IT and security teams had questions for Material, they got answers fast.
“One of the big things that makes Material unique in this space is their team, which is professional to an extraordinary degree,” says Thomas. “We really enjoy working with those folks. Every question and issue we bring to them gets addressed thoroughly and with abundant communication.”
With a successful deployment, Thomas and his team had a great deal of confidence in Material’s efficient and knowledgeable team moving forward.
A single pane of glass into two cloud office suites
Thanks to acquisitions and mergers over the years, Mariner’s environment spans multiple tenants across both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 instances. They use Material’s Posture Management to maintain seamless visibility and control over everything.
“The great thing about Posture Management is that it takes all of those environments, all of those tenants, and reports on them in one screen. We can get an overview of the state of our entire footprint from one place–and we can respond to issues we find from there as well,” says Thomas. “There’s no additional tools needed–one analyst can easily handle that side of our operations with a small portion of their day.”
Early in their partnership with Material, users and executives alike were skeptical of the new security controls. But Thomas and Chris used Posture Management’s data-backed risk findings to justify the urgency to improve data protection in the inbox. "The risk analytics from Material helped provide the data we needed for executive buy-in. It helped identify any potential risks we had in the mailbox and prioritize accordingly," recalls Chris. Rather than push back, executives ended up champions with this new visibility into risk.
A true zero trust mentality for email
Email is Mariner Wealth Advisors’ main communication tool, and the #1 platform they focus on de-risking. Knowing that no solution is ever 100% perfect in catching threats, Mariner Wealth Advisors needed a zero trust strategy for email. "Taking a Zero Trust approach to email security is critical because malicious content is always going to get through,” says Thomas. “Blockers might catch 98% of attacks, but the answer is not to get from 98% to 99%--because that’s still not bulletproof. It's better to take that money and invest in something like Material."
As a result of implementing Material’s Data Protection for Email, the security team successfully cut down their attack surface for both pre- and post-breach threats. “If someone gets in and does an account takeover, they have access to only a sliver of what’s actually in that mail. Material gives us a great deal of comfort in that area.”
Chris underscores: "Material helped us flip our email security strategy on its head. We have visibility the other way around now - we’re proactive vs reactive. I tell everyone about Material."
Mariner Wealth Advisors is securing their entire email environment from every angle, protecting their users and clients while maintaining productivity.
