How Grand Canyon Education Enhanced Their Cloud Security with CloudGuard

Educational institutions face unique challenges in maintaining robust cloud security. Grand Canyon Education (GCE) is a shared services partner dedicated to serving colleges and universities. GCE supports partner institutions’ students through operational functions that achieve organizational growth and student success.

“CloudGuard Posture Management enabled us to understand our environment comprehensively, find vulnerabilities, and prioritize what was most vulnerable and the highest risk to us,” shares Michael Manrod, CISO at Grand Canyon Education.

The Challenge of Cloud Visibility

As Grand Canyon Education expanded its cloud computing infrastructure, they encountered a common problem: maintaining visibility across their growing cloud environment. The company initially relied on external consultants for periodic assessments, which provided only snapshot views of their security posture at specific moments in time. Without real-time feedback about necessary fixes, the security team struggled to prioritize and address vulnerabilities effectively.

Finding the Right Solution

The organization implemented Check Point’s CloudGuard platform, which offered both Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Code Security capabilities. This comprehensive approach enabled them to tackle both infrastructure and application security challenges simultaneously, while fostering collaboration across different teams within the organization. Regular cross-team meetings became opportunities to review security findings and develop collaborative solutions, breaking down traditional operational silos.

Securing Code in the Cloud

A critical component of the company’s security strategy was ensuring the safety of their application code. “Code security is critical to us,” explains Cameron Kownack, IT Security Engineer at GCE. “We want secure cloud infrastructure to deliver services, but we also want to ensure the code running on that infrastructure is secure. Are there dependencies or libraries that are vulnerable? Are there other problems an adversary could exploit to compromise our Internet-facing cloud assets? Code Security enables us to find and correct those problems and helps us to achieve those goals.”

CloudGuard Code Security provides automated vulnerability detection and prevents exposed credentials, ensuring that security is maintained throughout the development process. This proactive approach to code security helps identify and address potential vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.

Transformative Results

The implementation proved to be transformative for the organization’s security operations. As Kownack notes, “I would highly recommend Check Point if asked. The ease of Check Point implementation and the ample security findings it quickly provided make Check Point a slam dunk.”

Through automated security assessments, improved visibility, and enhanced collaboration, Grand Canyon Education has established a more robust and proactive approach to cloud security while maintaining focus on their primary mission: providing quality education in a secure digital environment.

To learn more, visit Grand Canyon Education’s case study.