KAYAK puts the connectivity cloud to work
For a company that helps millions of people explore new destinations, it might not be surprising that KAYAK’s own enterprise spans the globe. The company — which makes it easy to search hundreds of travel sites at once — has over 800 employees plus hundreds of contractors in over 10 countries.
As the company’s global footprint has expanded over time, KAYAK’s IT environment has evolved considerably. “It used to be that the office was the place where employees could connect to the network. But in a cloud-first world, that doesn’t make sense. People are working everywhere,” says Tom Parker, VP of IT and CISO at KAYAK. “The network experience shouldn’t be different whether at home, the coffee shop, or the office.”
The company’s current strategy is designed to make location irrelevant. “Being in the office no longer gives any extra access to anything on the network or any of KAYAK’s IT resources,” says Parker. “Instead, tools installed on a company computer provide that access.”
Of course, supporting a distributed workforce is not easy. Parker and his team have had to manage an increasingly complex modern network — with multiple clouds, proliferating apps, and an expanding threat landscape. In this article, Tom Parker discusses the challenge of balancing innovation and security, and explains how a unified networking and security platform can help achieve that balance.
Q: What are the most significant challenges you’ve encountered at KAYAK navigating a modern IT environment?
Tom Parker: The biggest is striking the proper balance between security, agility, and innovation. If you’re not innovating and moving fast, you’re going to fall behind, meaning we can’t be the “Department of No.” So we encourage people to involve the security team as they try new things to make sure those tools are vetted and secure. We’ve built a very formalized, thorough in-house system for procurement of software applications to make sure we don’t compromise ourselves, but the default is to allow teams opportunities to add tools that let us do things in new ways, improve productivity, and add incremental value to the business.
Q: How does this principle of balancing innovation with security apply to something like AI, so it can be implemented quickly and safely?
Parker: With AI applications, the most important thing we’re protecting is personally identifiable information (PII). That’s the big gold mine if you look at all the ransomware attacks. But you always have to be experimenting with things. New tech is what spurs innovation. The key to coping with the risks is to have good governance that is not overly burdensome. The first thing we did at KAYAK was have our legal and development teams create a policy about how our AI initiatives are supposed to work. From there, it’s vital to have consistent reviews.
Meanwhile, we’ve invested more in automation with an eye toward that balance. Ten years ago, all laptop builds were manual. Now it’s all automated. Automation helps employees request access to an application and have the approval process go much more smoothly.
Q: Why is a unified networking and security architecture so critical for achieving business goals?
Parker: Obviously, we want to make our network as hard to penetrate as possible, but at the same time, we don’t want to slow people down. A secure network that’s also low latency allows people to access their applications, tools, and tasks quickly.
The connectivity cloud that Cloudflare has created has helped us achieve this, because they have a huge network enabling people all over the planet to connect and access what they need quickly and securely. A connectivity cloud is highly reliable, and the performance is excellent because they have so many points of presence. I believe the connectivity cloud increases performance anywhere in the world.
Moreover, we’ve been able to gain greater control from a security standpoint. In our previous architecture, resources inside the network were accessed through a traditional VPN. Moving to a Zero Trust network architecture, individuals can only access the resources they need. No more, no less.
Q: How do technology partners help you develop robust, secure IT infrastructure?
Parker: Not that long ago, companies tried to build much of their IT infrastructure on their own using on-premises software, infrastructure, and networks, spreading IT teams thin. The evolution of SaaS service providers has enabled companies to use technology more effectively, move faster, and have greater security because the companies providing these services are focused on their products in ways internal IT teams couldn’t do. It’s a matter of focus. Cloudflare takes security very seriously and is also very transparent. They’re always looking to get better at what they do.
We’ve been through other providers, with mixed results. When we moved to Cloudflare, it just clicked. People who were really down on our last solution quickly saw the improvement.
This article is part of a series on the latest trends and topics impacting today’s technology decision-makers.
Dive deeper into this topic.
Learn more about how a connectivity cloud can help improve visibility and control even for complex IT environments in the Executive Guide: Connectivity Cloud, Explained.
This article was originally produced for The Wall Street Journal.
Author
Tom Parker
VP of IT and CISO, KAYAK
Key takeaways
After reading this article you will be able to understand:
How Kayak increased agility and strengthened security
Ways to innovate securely
The role of unification in controlling the network