Video Transcript: Ulta Beauty Customer Testimonial
My name is Diane Brown and I work for Ulta beauty, I’ve been there for 14 years.
API security is very importand and that’s one of the things that’s been on our road for 2022.
We are currently out a path to change our e-commerce platform and we decided to go more microservice like everybody else.
That is the go forward patch give the business the agility they need to continue to drive revenue but with that also comes the API world, the world of API.
The question we asked Team today. How many do you think we have? And they’re like, eah, well, maybe 100. I’m like, I think we’re going to be surprised.
I think that we think it’s one number because that’s what we ourselves introduced, but now with SaaS, it’s so easy for the business partner with people and get this set up without a lot of IT involvement.
And I think things are going more unnoticed than they had in the past, like with Log4J that came out, I think that was an eye opener for the entire world becasue it was so hard to find.
And even your different partners that you delt with they didn’t even know they had Log4J in their tools or in their solutions.
We’re finding these things out later in life and it’s more difficult for us to stay ahead and manage that that’s why having partners coming up with tools for us that help us in this microservices journey path we’re on right now, it’s kind of scary.
Lots of things that are new out there, but with this API security, the Spyder API security, we’re really hoping that we can get in there and help ease our mind when it comes to our customer and the data.
It’s all the customer data and making sure we’re protecting our guests.
So precursor for us, looking at a bot manangement solution actually was the whole account takeover and the fact that the business thought that we need to help our guests and experience that they have.
At that time we were really new to the whole bot management so what we did is we first started tweaking our web application firewall and we found out that was a lot of work, and it doesn’t really work as well, we’re like ok there’s got to be another solution out there.
Security vendors in general all start with that statement is they can look through the eyes of the CISO and what their role is.
We get contacted all the time by your competitors and they’re like, What do we need to do? What do we need to do? And at this point, the team is like we’re not even looking.
We struggle with organized crime, as with most retailers in how to actually get ahead of the game. We hae fragrances in our stores. Everybody loves fragrances. They’re, you know, quite expensive.
And we get people that come in there around a quarter to nine at night right before the store closes and clean us out.
And we were actually able to find using Cequence, a web scraping tool that was actually scraping inventory at our stores trying to decide which of the stores had a lot of inventory for fragrance.
And because Cequence was able to find that, we were able to tie that together with some of the organized crime had been happening in that area.
And they were actually able to provide information to the authorities. And as a CISO that’s one thing I look for is like how do I continue to value out of a partnership, without just having to continue to lay out money?
You know, I can pay for things, that’s really easy to hand people money, but money doesn’t alwasy get you that value and get you that value add.
And I think that’s one of the great things with the partnership with Cequence is that value add that we get and I feel that they’re, the team at Cequence is an extension of our Ulta team.
