Boardriders has a global footprint compromising over 700 retail locations across six continents, 20 e-commerce sites, and multiple warehouses around the world. From a security perspective, the greatest challenge was a question of how to protect a truly global business with only a small team.

"Visibility across all of our data centers and networks is key, but there was also a strong appetite for a solution that could take action autonomously to contain the more malicious and fast-moving cyber-attacks, when there wasn't necessarily a human on call to respond to an incident," commented Willem Lock, Head of Global Infrastructure, Network and Security at Boardriders.

The company turned to Darktrace's Self-Learning AI and Autonomous Response to gain comprehensive visibility and protection over its network and cloud environments. The technology immediately began learning the normal 'patterns of life' for every user and device in the organization, revealing subtle deviations that indicate a potential threat.

In the first few weeks of deploying Darktrace, the team at Boardriders had sufficient confidence in the decision-making of the AI to switch the technology to fully autonomous mode, allowing Darktrace RESPOND to take autonomous action to contain in-progress cyber-attacks.

"This added another level of protection from fast-moving threats like ransomware, but it also afforded us the valuable gift of time," noted Lock. "With Darktrace RESPOND taking action 24/7 on our network and cloud applications, we've seen a significant reduction in the time required for our security team to respond to threats. Time is of the essence in security, and Darktrace gives us back some critical hours in our day."

In 2021, Boardriders became the victim of an attempted ransomware attack, but Darktrace was the first to respond. The team was alerted to the situation via Darktrace's Mobile App within minutes, and Darktrace's SOC swiftly provided the team advice on how to act.

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In addition to protecting its on-premise infrastructure, Darktrace's coverage extends to Boardriders' cloud environment, including Microsoft 365. "Darktrace has been crucial in shining a light on account takeovers and other malicious activity across our cloud applications," noted Lock. "This has been especially important to us in the era of remote and hybrid working patterns: having an extra layer of visibility across these applications gives us the confidence that we have all bases covered."

Darktrace also works with a number of Boardriders' other security tools. For example, the technology is connected to Microsoft 365 Defender. With this integration, the company can import its logs from Defender into the Darktrace dashboard. "We find that it gives us a more readable, user-friendly format which allows us to quickly understand what happened, and quickly respond to the alerts," said Lock.

"The usability and interconnectivity of Darktrace streamlines our workflow and makes our lives easier every single day. But we also know that when the unexpected does occur and we do come under attack, we have best-in-class AI-powered detection and response to keep our global business running smoothly."