​​DXC streamlines IT management, improves visibility, unites a global estate with Microsoft Security solutions​

Powering the global powerhouses that move the world

DXC Technology embedded its commitment to its mission in its name: Delivering Excellence for our Customers & Colleagues. The company provides business-critical IT services to some of the largest companies and public-sector organizations in the world, offering IT and business process outsourcing, analytics and engineering, applications, modern workplace, and cybersecurity and cloud services. Accommodating both cloud and on-premises environments goes along with that expansive territory. DXC’s 130,000 employees serve customers in more than 70 countries, earning accolades like the Titanium Black partner from Dell Technologies and FY23 Pure Storage GSI Partner of the Year. 
 

Sustaining that excellence across such an enormous and diverse customer base evokes a multitude of challenges to effective management of DXC’s internal IT assets. It must coordinate with a worldwide subsidiary network, manage identity and device security for its large and diverse workforce, ensure compliance with various national regulations, and manage the on-premises datacenters needed to satisfy data sovereignty requirements.
 

The company answers those demands with Microsoft Security solutions, uniting security data with Microsoft Sentinel, coordinating identity management with Microsoft Entra ID, and carefully managing compliance and insider risk with Microsoft Purview. It uses Microsoft Intune to manage employee devices in support of its teams as they deliver the services that delight even the most exacting customer. And the scalability and heightened security it achieves exemplify best practices for its customers.
   

Building the airplane in midflight

DXC’s complexity and global scale first attracted Michael Baker, Vice President and IT Chief Information Security Officer at DXC Technology, to the company. “But now, I value DXC’s people most,” he says. “They’re top-notch. And as we transform our company to be more responsive and resilient, the employee excitement is highly energizing.” He’s referring to the company’s ambitious internal IT makeover. “We’ve struggled with the outdated systems and processes that accumulated from multiple acquisitions,” he continues. “Our IT team wants to be the cutting-edge group that accelerates business value for our company by making it easy for customers to work with DXC. Microsoft is one of our primary partners in making that vision a reality.” 
 

Suresh Gumma, Director for Cyber Strategy and Architecture at DXC Technology, relishes the challenge. “We thrive on the satisfaction of solving global problems,” he says. “Even a small configuration change can affect the experience for everyone at DXC.” And as the IT provider to a sophisticated customer base, DXC aspires to be a standout example in its solution choices and implementation methodology. “We are customer zero for DXC,” explains Gumma. “We test every tool thoroughly, rolling it out within our organization and sharing our experiences afterward with DXC offering and delivery teams and, ultimately, customers. It’s a win-win—after all, we share the same goals.” 
 

The company began its internal makeover with an accelerated rollout that it likens to building an airplane while in midflight. Part of the power for liftoff came from its use of Windows Autopilot, a feature of Microsoft Intune. “Think of imaging devices for 130,000 workers and then deploying them around the world,” says Gumma. “It’s no small task. But by adopting Microsoft Security solutions and technologies like Windows Autopilot in Intune, we did it much faster than anyone thought we could.”
   

Beginning with device and identity management

Deploying devices to a virtual-first workforce of 130,000 involves much more than placing the physical item into the right hands. DXC must also safeguard each device from the outset until end of life. That’s why the company equipped its workers with Microsoft 365 E5, which includes advanced security capabilities. For example, DXC implemented Microsoft 365 Defender, which coordinates with Microsoft Entra ID and other Microsoft Defender solutions to help DXC quickly identify and prevent attacks across domains. DXC builds stringent security practices into its device provisioning process by creating policies and procedures in Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and using Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to sharpen endpoint visibility for faster risk remediation. “The sign-in experience is seamless from the employee’s perspective, and with Microsoft Defender solutions, we also have the information we need to assess employee behavior and make risk-based decisions,” says Gumma. “The visibility we gain with Defender for Endpoint is mind-boggling. And it would be very difficult for us to operate our business without the standard process we’ve created in Intune with Windows Autopilot to deliver devices to our employees and manage them effectively.” The company extends the same cloud-based functionality to its on-premises users with Microsoft Defender for Identity.  
 

Gumma’s team expands behavioral user data into a more contextual realm with Defender for Cloud Apps, which reveals unsanctioned cloud applications. “We also use Conditional Access policies to pinpoint attempts to access unapproved cloud applications,” says Gumma. That information ties in to the rules his team creates as they deploy company compliance management in multiple countries with Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager, which makes it easier for DXC to meet the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements and comply with regulations in the United States, Australia, and other countries. DXC is also configuring Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management. “Data exfiltration is a major risk,” says Gumma. “We’re using Microsoft Purview to help mitigate insider risk at DXC and protect our vital intellectual property.”  

While the company handles device management with Intune, it relies on Microsoft Entra ID for the other side of the user equation. “By using Microsoft Entra ID for identity management, we accelerated our deployments across the board for endpoint management, metering how many workers would receive certain technologies,” says Gumma. The IT team at DXC built its cloud environments in Azure to make use of the platform’s native automation capabilities. This streamlines the process of adding and removing vendor technologies to the DXC environment. “One of our key architecture principles is automation, automation, automation,” he continues. “We recently deployed a network security capability for access control and visibility, for a specific project, and the Azure automation we used went exactly according to plan with zero incidents.”  
 

Harnessing Microsoft Sentinel power with Defender for Cloud Apps

With its Defender for Cloud Apps deployment underway, the IT team now maps data from DXC cloud applications to understand how it can use that information for better cybersecurity insights. In some DXC areas, petabytes of data from SharePoint and OneDrive flow into Defender for Cloud Apps. “We make judicious decisions about whether an app answers a valid business need and is being used properly based on the risk scores assigned within Defender for Cloud Apps,” says Gumma. His team is refining its view of those apps, tagging OneDrive accounts for the users’ day-to-day work as opposed to those requiring deeper protection.    
 

The data flows into Microsoft Sentinel, the cloud-based security information and event management (SIEM) solution with built-in AI and machine learning capabilities, which DXC uses to automate and expedite threat hunting. In a world of massive datasets and complexity stemming from a global presence, simplification is the name of the game. “All the logs from our Defender tools can feed into Microsoft Sentinel,” explains Gumma. “That’s a huge advantage of the Microsoft ecosystem.”  
 

DXC ingests logs from more than 10,000 sources, including network devices, firewalls, and Windows, Linux, and other entities, into Microsoft Sentinel. “Other SIEM solutions demand extensive infrastructure. By comparison, Microsoft Sentinel requires zero infrastructure. My team was amazed at how easy and fast it was—about a week—to ingest data for our first Microsoft Sentinel use case. It was as simple as turning a few knobs,” says Gumma. He notes that with the rapid adoption of Microsoft Sentinel, the company was able to integrate with DXC’s managed extended detection and response (XDR) solution for workplace protection across endpoints, identities, email, and applications. Built on Microsoft 365 Defender, DXC managed XDR provides both protection against sophisticated attacks and around-the-clock investigation and remediation of issues by expert security analysts. 
 

Creating a collaboration for now and the future

When they consider the progress made over a year of rapid rollouts, Baker and Gumma emphasize their partnership with Microsoft. “The technology teams at Microsoft took the time to understand our data and the problems we were trying to solve,” says Gumma. “Working with them helped us accelerate our deployment, and we exchanged feedback to learn from each other for a successful project.” 
 

“We’re throwing old norms and assumptions out the window,” concludes Baker. “As we work to figure out additional ways to drive value at DXC, we’re also partnering with Microsoft to get the most value out of our connected Microsoft Security and productivity solutions. That’s key to our risk-based, Zero Trust roadmap.” 
 

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