The client is a trusted US-based health insurance provider. With a clientele of more than 2 million members nationwide, they were delivering comprehensive health coverage policies and solutions. Their diverse portfolio plans were tailored to individuals, families, and employer groups, supported by a large network of healthcare partners and service providers.
Their teams were operating through digital platforms, customer portals, mobile applications and an automated claims processing system. Their operations were managed on a complex digital ecosystem that is further divided into multiple on-premises data centers, hybrid cloud environments and integrated third-party platforms.
Reason for Collaboration
Earlier, they were managing security through manual processes, which led to delays in response and made the coordination a challenge between cross-teams. They struggled to identify and prioritize high-risk vulnerabilities across a distributed and complex IT environment without a centralized system. Security threats were tracked through obsolete approaches, which made it difficult to get a unified view of their risk posture or measure progress on compliance efforts.
As regulations like HIPAA grew all over the processes, keeping up with compliance without automation or standardized workflows became highly unmanageable. To improve their cybersecurity infrastructure and support long-term growth, they were looking for a seasoned ServiceNow Consulting & Implementation partner. The goal was to assist them in simplifying and enhancing their security operations, gaining clearer visibility into risks, and ensuring their system can scale with the business.
Challenges
Unstructured and Manual Security Incident Management: Their teams were still using disconnected tools and manual methods, including spreadsheets and siloed ticketing systems to track and respond to security incidents. This fragmented approach delayed triage and enrichment, introduced data inconsistencies, and made it difficult to track SLA or detect patterns across incidents. Response efforts were slow, reactive and error-prone without the right automation or a centralized system to monitor incident lifecycle and cross-functional collaboration.
Lack of Unified Vulnerability Prioritization Framework: There was no centralized way to aggregate, normalize or prioritize findings, even though the organization conducted vulnerability scans across cloud and on-premises infrastructure. However, these findings were not unified or prioritized effectively. Our experts found that there was no unified risk scoring system or business context that indicated vulnerabilities, leading to time wasted on fixing minor issues while high-risk vulnerabilities stayed open for weeks. This brought a security risk and frustrated the security operations team into the picture, who struggled to find their way out.
Limited Threat Intelligence Integration: Even though they had access to external threat intelligence feeds, no streamline process integrated this data into day-to-day security operations. Threat indicators were not contextualized or correlated with active incidents. It prevented teams from provocatively acting on the known threats before they could cause a scene. Without automated mapping of indicators to assets or users, threat response remained reactive and delayed, which limited their ability to de-risk the potential breaches early.
Compliance Management Complexities: The client struggled to keep up with evolving compliance requirements, including HIPAA, NAIC Model Law, and state-specific mandates. Audit preparations were time-consuming, manual, and inconsistent, often requiring cross-team coordination with no or less system-backed support.
Without continuous control monitoring or alignment with security benchmarks like NIST or CIS, maintaining a compliance posture and demonstrating readiness for audits was challenging, making the client vulnerable to non-compliance penalties and reputational risks.
Solutions
After understanding what the client sought, our ServiceNow Consultants created an architecture for implementation of a purpose-built ServiceNow Security Operations (SecOps) framework and the required modules in it.
Implemented ServiceNow Security Incident Response: We implemented ServiceNow Security Incident Response (SIR) modules to create a central coordination hub for all security incidents within their existing platform. This enabled their team to transition from email and spreadsheet to a unified incident lifecycle with clear defined stages. We also integrated key detection tools like Splunk and CrowdStrike to automate incident creation, enriched incoming alerts with contextual data from the CMDB. Further, we configured dynamic workflows and playbooks for repeatable incident types.
SLA tracking, role-based visibility, and audit-ready logs made responses faster and improved accountability across security, IT, and compliance teams.
Deployed Vulnerability Response Module with Business Context Mapping: We deployed the Vulnerability Response module to address inefficient vulnerability handling and integrated it with the client’s scanning tools (e.g. Qualys, Tenable). We enhanced this setup by mapping discovered vulnerabilities to business-critical CIs in the CMDB, it facilitated risk-based prioritization.
By incorporating asset importance, exposure, and ownership into the decision-making process, our experts make sure that the security team focuses more on strategic tasks. Further, we worked on automating their ticket creation and remediation workflows, routing them directly to the responsible teams for operational transparency.
Integrated Real-Time Threat Intelligence into SecOps: For ingesting IOCs from external feeds, we configured the Threat Intelligence module and integrated it with the broader SecOps environment. These indicators were automatically correlated with active security incidents and known vulnerabilities, allowing team to quickly determine exposure to emerging threats.
We also aligned threat intelligence data to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. It improved analyst awareness of attack vectors and helping shape response strategies based on observed threat behaviors. This also reduced response time and enabled proactive defense planning.
Streamlined Regulatory Compliance with Configuration Compliance: Our ServiceNow experts implemented Configuration Compliance and tailored it to industry-required frameworks. It comprises HIPAA, NIST 800-53, and CIS benchmarks to simplify reactive compliance practices.
We automated the assessment of configuration drift across critical assets and set-up real-time dashboards to visualize compliance posture. The system triggered alerts and launched remediation workflows, enabling continuous control monitoring. It also generated scheduled reports and maintained audit trails to support internal governance and streamline external audit preparations.
Benefits
- Centralized and automated security incident management leading to faster response times.
- Enhanced vulnerability management with prioritized remediation efforts.
- Proactive threat detection and response through integrated threat intelligence.
- Simplified compliance management with automated reporting and continuous monitoring.
