Success Story

Increasing Visibility, Improving Compliance

Ameritas significantly enhances its AWS CIS compliance posture with Qualys TotalCloud 

SNAPSHOT

Founded 1887, Lincoln, Nebraska

2,500 Employees 

6M

customers

Website

Summary

Ameritas is a leading insurance, employee benefits and financial services company that offers a wide range of insurance and financial products and services to millions of individuals, families and businesses nationwide.

Products

TotalCloud, Vulnerability Management, Detection & Response (VMDR), Web Application Scanning, CyberSecurity Asset Management (CSAM)

6000+

Extended protection across 6,000+ cloud and on-premises assets 

2x

Achieved a 2x improvement in AWS CIS compliance posture score 

56%

reduction in misconfigurations across the AWS estate 

-

Accelerated audit preparation with real-time compliance insight  

Business Background

With financial services spanning life, wealth and health, Ameritas strives to help its customers make a brighter future for themselves, their families, and their employees. To achieve this goal, the company depends on its digital capabilities, which are built on a hybrid, multi-cloud technology environment that spans both on-premises infrastructure and AWS and Azure cloud platforms. To enhance security and strengthen its compliance posture, Ameritas decided to extend its existing Qualys solutions across its sizeable cloud estate. 

Qualys TotalCloud has helped us nearly double our AWS CIS compliance posture score. This improvement provides tangible evidence of stronger controls and reduced risk exposure.

Director of Security, Engineering and Operations, Ameritas

Business Challenges

Enable secure, scalable and resilient technology delivery with a cloud-first strategy that leverages both AWS and Azure 

Maintain configuration integrity at scale as the cloud environment expands across multiple accounts and services 

Detect and mitigate configuration drift and ensure consistent application of security baselines 

Move beyond CVSS scores to enable a risk-based approach to remediation and hardening

Improve risk prioritization to ensure the most impactful issues are addressed first 

Qualys Solution

As a long-term user of Qualys solutions such as Qualys VMDR, Web Application Scanning (WAS), and CyberSecurity Asset Management (CSAM) for its on-premises systems, Ameritas targeted a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) that would integrate seamlessly with its existing ecosystem and workflows. Qualys TotalCloud was the answer. 

“Qualys TotalCloud gives us the ability to combine multiple scanning approaches in a single solution, which significantly improves visibility and coverage across our cloud environments,” says Delonte Johnson, Director of Security, Engineering and Operations at Ameritas. This flexibility ensures more comprehensive discovery, reduces blind spots, and provides our security teams with a unified view across different workload types and lifecycle stages.” 

Qualys logo

When Ameritas first deployed Qualys TotalCloud across all its discoverable AWS services, the impact was immediate. Following the initial discovery scans, the solution helped Delonte’s team identify a substantial number of misconfigurations among the servers running on AWS. “These were primarily cases where the configuration was inconsistent with our baseline, rather than unknown vulnerabilities,” explains Delonte. “By correcting those issues, we increased our AWS CIS compliance posture score by nearly double.” 

A key benefit of the solution is the ability to generate TruRisk Scores, which combine vulnerability severity, exploitability and threat intelligence metrics to help the Ameritas Cloud Engineering team prioritize the most serious and urgent issues. “TruRisk helps us focus our engineering and security resources and align our security decisions with actual business impact,” says Delonte. “This reduces alert fatigue and helps us focus on the risks that matter most.” 

Qualys has significantly increased our visibility into AWS and will continue to serve as a foundational platform for cloud risk intelligence, posture management, and vulnerability prioritization as our cloud environment scales and matures.

Director of Security, Engineering and Operations, Ameritas

Qualys Difference

  • Increased visibility across the AWS estate, bringing unknown and unmanaged assets under central oversight 
  • Accelerated remediation of misconfigurations, creating a consistent security baseline across thousands of cloud assets 
  • Significantly reduced the total number of vulnerabilities that the Cloud Engineering team needs to address 
  • Improved risk prioritization, accelerating response to high-risk issues and reducing time spent triaging false positives and low-impact alerts 
  • Nearly doubled Ameritas’ AWS CIS cloud security posture score, providing tangible evidence of stronger controls and reduced risk exposure 
  • Simplified audit preparation and reduced the manual effort required to demonstrate compliance with regulatory and internal controls 
  • Integrated seamlessly with existing security ecosystem, providing consistent insight across both cloud and on-premises assets 

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ABOUT QUALYS

Qualys, Inc. (NASDAQ: QLYS) is a pioneer and leading provider of disruptive cloud-based security, compliance and IT solutions with more than 10,000 subscription customers worldwide, including a majority of the Forbes Global 100 and Fortune 100. Qualys helps organizations streamline and automate their security and compliance solutions onto a single platform for greater agility, better business outcomes, and substantial cost savings. For more information, please visit qualys.com. 

Qualys, Qualys VMDR® and the Qualys logo are proprietary trademarks of Qualys, Inc. All other products or names may be trademarks of their respective companies.