Contrast Security > Case Studies > Kaizen Gaming Enhances Application Security with Contrast Assess

Kaizen Gaming Enhances Application Security with Contrast Assess

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
Cybersecurity & Privacy - Application Security

Applicable Industries

Equipment & Machinery
National Security & Defense

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Tamper Detection
Time Sensitive Networking

Services

Testing & Certification
Training

About The Customer

Kaizen Gaming is a leading GameTech company based in Athens, Greece. The company operates two primary brands, Betano and Stoixman, and supports both casino and sports games. Kaizen games are available in six countries — Brazil, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Portugal, and Romania. The company has a large development operation involved in developing new products and enhancing existing ones. It uses the Agile methodology and currently has 28 fully staffed Scrum teams. The team’s release cycle typically centers around two-week sprints by each Scrum team. In terms of languages, Kaizen primarily uses .NET Core and .NET Framework for application development. The company's information security team is small, but most of the security programs they lead are cross-functional and involve stakeholders from other parts of the organization.

The Challenge

Kaizen Gaming, a leading GameTech company, faced significant challenges in its application security. The company's large development operation, which includes 28 fully staffed Scrum teams, was struggling with late identification of vulnerabilities in the software development life cycle (SDLC). This late detection resulted in remediation work being pushed to the end of the development process, causing extra work and stress. The company's reliance on penetration testing did not provide real-time, holistic observability into Kaizen’s overall application portfolio, leading to blind spots and inefficiencies. The company needed an automated, efficient, and scalable solution that could catch vulnerabilities earlier in the process without slowing down their developers. Additionally, the financial team preferred a pricing model that charges by the application rather than by the developer due to the company's large development team and tight margins.

The Solution

Kaizen Gaming chose to implement Contrast Assess, a modern instrumentation approach that uses security instrumentation to do continuous vulnerability scanning from within an application. The scanning happens in the background, eliminating interruptions to the development process and providing continuous feedback to developers when a vulnerability is detected. The Application Security Platform on which Contrast Assess is built provides complete, ongoing security observability for the entire application infrastructure. Kaizen deployed Contrast Assess with Contrast Support Services, which helped to ensure everything was working correctly. The company also uses the native integration with Jira that is built into the Application Security Platform, and is looking to deploy the integration with Slack. In addition to using Assess during the development process, Kaizen’s team uses it with its application in production as well, allowing the tool to perform real-life testing on their application. This has automated the identification of vulnerabilities in their code and made it continuous.

Operational Impact

The implementation of Contrast Assess has brought significant operational benefits to Kaizen Gaming. The tool's real-time, continuous vulnerability scanning has eliminated the late detection of vulnerabilities, reducing stress and extra work for the development teams. The automated identification of vulnerabilities has also made the remediation process more efficient. The tool's integration with Jira and Slack has streamlined project management and communication processes. The ability to prioritize vulnerabilities by risk has improved the company's application security posture. Furthermore, the deployment of applications into production has become much easier and stress-free. The company is also considering adding Contrast OSS to bolster and automate risk management for the opensource elements in the Kaizen application.

Quantitative Benefit

Reduced mean time to remediate (MTTR) by 15 days
5 vulnerabilities discovered immediately when Contrast Assess was turned on, 3 that required immediate remediation
Significant improvements in time to remediation and reduction to security debt