Success Story

Streamlining Cyber Risk Management

Ameritas simplifies its approach to risk prioritization and builds a single source of truth for asset management with the Qualys Enterprise TruRisk™ Platform

Insurance

2.5K

Employees

US National

Website

Business

Ameritas is a marketing name for Ameritas Mutual Holding Company and its affiliated subsidiary companies, including Ameritas Life Insurance Corp. and Ameritas Life Insurance Corp. of New York. Founded in 1887, Ameritas offers a wide range of insurance and financial products and services to individuals, families and businesses. These products and services include life insurance; annuities; individual disability income insurance; group dental, vision and hearing care insurance; and retirement plans. For more information, visit ameritas.com

Customer Environment

~3,000 user endpoints, including Microsoft Windows and macOS employee workstations and laptops

~4,000 on-premises servers, network devices and cloud assets, including Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 instances

Qualys customer since 2016 with on-going module adoption to maximize the value of the Qualys Platform

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 include a wide range of internal- and customer-facing services. To enhance its ability to protect its servers and endpoints, Ameritas aimed to gain deeper insight into its asset base and streamline its approach to prioritizing remediation activities.

Business Challenges

Replace manual, time-consuming vulnerability risk prioritization with a faster, more efficient approach

Gain deeper risk insights by incorporating threat intelligence from trusted external sources into prioritization processes

Build a comprehensive, centralized view of asset inventory across the business

Maximize its investment in Qualys for centralized asset visibility and enhanced risk prioritization and reduction

The Qualys Threat Research Unit is our trusted, authoritative source for vulnerability-related analysis and guidance, saving us countless hours that allows us to focus on mitigating and remediating the highest-risk vulnerabilities.
Scott FrederickDirector of Vulnerability Management, Ameritas

Qualys Solution

Ameritas must maintain a robust information security and data governance posture while operating in a highly regulated sector. Previously, each Ameritas department managed its own asset inventory, creating isolated information pools that limited visibility across the organization. By adopting Qualys Cybersecurity Asset Management, TotalCloud, and Container Security, Ameritas has consolidated these fragmented inventories into a unified source of truth for asset data. This integration provides real-time insights and allows Ameritas to cross-reference cloud and containerized environments for a comprehensive view of all assets supporting critical business applications.

Ameritas leverages Qualys TruRisk to effectively prioritize and manage vulnerabilities, integrating the TruRisk score directly into its threat protection strategy. This approach simplifies Ameritas’ previous complex and time-consuming remediation prioritization process, to more quickly address high-risk vulnerabilities. By utilizing TruRisk’s detection scores, Ameritas has created a streamlined prioritization scheme that efficiently communicates risk levels across the organization—even to the board level. This clear risk terminology has standardized discussions around vulnerability criticality, enabling more focused and actionable remediation strategies. In addition to TruRisk, Ameritas depends on Qualys’ Threat Research Unit (TRU) as a reliable external resource for vulnerability assessment. TRU’s threat intelligence and expert insights enable Ameritas to validate and support their internal prioritization efforts without dedicating extensive time to justification. By integrating insights from TRU, Ameritas can better protect its mission-critical applications and confidently communicate security postures across business units, ultimately achieving greater clarity and peace of mind in its cybersecurity operations.

We’re maximizing the value of Qualys by leveraging TruRisk to enhance threat and remediation priorities and centralize and streamline asset management to enable smarter prioritization and faster response times.”
Scott FrederickDirector of Vulnerability Management, Ameritas

Qualys Difference

Centralizes Asset Visibility: Qualys consolidates previously fragmented asset inventories, delivering a single, real-time source of truth across environments.

Streamlines Vulnerability Prioritization: TruRisk scores simplify and standardize remediation by consistently prioritizing high-risk vulnerabilities across Ameritas’ entire organization.

Standardizes Risk Communication: TruRisk-based ‘risk bands’ enable clear, actionable risk discussions up to Ameritas’ board level for unified alignment.

Expert Intelligence: The Threat Research Unit provides trusted, validated insights that simplify Ameritas operational processes.

Qualys VMDR has been a cornerstone of our vulnerability management program for over eight years.”
Scott FrederickDirector of Vulnerability Management, Ameritas

Business

Outcomes

Saves two hours per week by eliminating manual risk prioritization and reporting tasks

Reduces the risk of human error and bias in the vulnerability prioritization process

Cuts time to build risk reports for senior leadership teams from hours to minutes

Consolidates more than 30 separate sources of asset data into a single, central inventory

Helps identify and remediate the highest-risk vulnerabilities efficiently across more than 7,000 assets