Complete visibility to quickly find the source of application and network issues
The ability to ensure the secure delivery of cloud applications
The adaptability to grow with infrastructure upgrades
The Beginning
Building a Solid Infrastructure Foundation for Growth
MAPCO operates a growing network of convenience store locations across the southeastern United States. The company prides itself on delivering an exceptional customer experience, from quality products and services to its beloved Feel Good coffee.
In 2019, MAPCO began laying the groundwork for further expansion. To rapidly scale up IT resources on-demand to support both in-store and operations-focused applications, the team at MAPCO turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, the move to AWS also introduced complexity when it came to visibility across their environment.
"The network might be having a very simple problem, like an overloaded circuit dropping packets, but if you don't know what it is, you can't fix it," said Ricardo Bauza, Sr. Network Engineer at MAPCO. "Without visibility, it can take hours to pin down the problem. That can really affect our operations and harm customer experience."
Instead of spending three or four days on a problem, with ExtraHop we were able to fix it in an hour.
Ricardo Bauza
Senior Network Engineer,
MAPCO
The Transformation
The Road to Cloud Adoption
MAPCO was already using ExtraHop Reveal(x) in its datacenter to monitor the performance of applications on the network. When Bauza and his team settled on AWS as the right solution to scale out their operations and infrastructure, they turned to Reveal(x) to provide monitoring across not only on-premises but cloud workloads as well.
"ExtraHop was awesome because it was an all-in-one solution," said Bauza. "Our team didn't have to learn a new tool, and we had information about the health and security of all of our applications in one place. With the built-in option for traffic mirroring in AWS, implementing Reveal(x) in the cloud was easy—it took less than 30 minutes."
The Outcome
Fueling Growth in a Changing World
Unified Visibility Across Workloads and Teams
With Reveal(x), MAPCO provides both IT Ops and security practitioners with the detection, investigation, and response capabilities they need to manage and secure applications across their growing hybrid environment and in-store operations. IT can quickly troubleshoot the cause of network slowdowns, developers are able to solve issues with their applications, and security teams can detect potential threats before they can harm business operations.
"Even if you're using AWS and all the tools that it provides, like CloudWatch, it's not the same information that you can see with ExtraHop," Bauza said.
Supporting the Transition to Remote Operations
In March 2020 when COVID-19 started to spread in the US, MAPCO, like many organizations, needed to transition a large portion of its headquarters employees to remote work.
"With ExtraHop, we had the visibility we needed to make that transition with confidence," said Bauza. "We were able to move 300 people to using VPN in less than three days, verify the security of those configurations, and monitor to make sure remote employees could access what they needed to stay productive. We're proud of what we accomplished for the business."