Desafios
Lanes Group is the largest wastewater maintenance provider in the UK, with more than 4,500 engineers working across the country. The company is cloud-first and runs its operations through Microsoft Azure and SaaS applications, with no on-premises infrastructure.
Around 80% of its workforce is field-based, working from sites, vehicles, and coffee shops. With employees accessing company systems through browsers, the team could not always see when customer data was exported, downloaded to a local drive, or moved to OneDrive.
Rapid growth added to the challenge. Lanes Group grew from around 300 employees in 2020 to more than 4,500. Each new contract and staff transfer brought additional employment files, training certificates, passports, and other personal data. The company also handled homeowner contact details and, when relevant, information about vulnerable people at a property.
The team had processes for using and disposing of this data, but manual audits could not keep pace with the scale of the environment.
“We didn’t have the resources to go and manually audit regularly enough,” says Mo Dashwood. “Quite simply, we can’t scale that.”
Solução
Lanes Group deployed Cyera to gain visibility into its cloud environment and prioritize its most critical data risks.
A native integration with the Azure Graph API required minimal configuration. The team connected to Azure in less than 15 minutes, with no impact to users or devices. Within 28 to 48 hours, Lanes Group could see its most critical risks and begin building a remediation plan.
Cyera ranked issues by criticality and enabled the team to remediate them directly. AI-driven scanning also removed the need to manually classify data. The team trained Cyera on industry-specific references, including terms such as manhole references that are unique to its operations.
Cyera also showed the team what data was stored across Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, helping Lanes Group address meaningful risks while continuing to support collaboration.
“We don’t want to be a blocker,” says Mo. “We want to be an enabler to success.”
Resultados
Lanes Group surfaced years of hidden data risk and remediated it in weeks rather than years. Key results included:
- 183 million records surfaced as at risk
- 99.5% of at-risk records remediated within six weeks
- 27 TB of data scanned across Microsoft 365
- Less than 15 minutes to connect to Azure
- Critical risks identified within 28 to 48 hours
- An estimated 635 days of manual remediation were completed in six weeks
- Ghost data stores cleared, reducing Microsoft licensing spend
- Budget freed for innovation by demonstrating value to the business
Cyera also helped Lanes Group identify where data needed to be secured and cleansed before advancing its AI and digital transformation initiatives.
“I would have absolutely no hesitation in recommending Cyera to anyone in the industry,” says Mo.
See how Lanes Group replaced manual audits with automated visibility and remediation. Read the full case study.
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