At Sellen Construction, safety is our top priority. We are one of the largest general contractors in the Pacific Northwest — we’ve changed tourist maps and helped grow the Seattle skyline. We are proud of our contribution to community structures, from high-rises and hospitals to campuses and high-tech facilities.

The Darktrace-Microsoft dynamic

All of our cloud applications that help us do our job – help us build great – are center to our digital strategy. We are true partners with Microsoft, not only are we a Microsoft 365 customer, but we have worked with them on their construction projects, even building one of the original sections of the Microsoft Campus.

Our digital ecosystem is centered around Microsoft: it’s our knowledge base, document management system, automation and analytics platform – it powers our day-to-day work and helps us deliver to our clients.

Darktrace is a critical component of our security stack because it protects our digital ecosystem and keeps us safe. When we first implemented Darktrace, we put in place the Enterprise Immune System to protect our infrastructure, and we’ve since added Darktrace for SaaS for total coverage. So not only do we have eyes across our digital estate detecting threats immediately, we also have the power of Autonomous Response. Darktrace for SaaS works with Microsoft seamlessly – the technology takes targeted action to contain in-progress threats in real time. It brings a sense of calm, knowing we have Darktrace and Microsoft in concert keeping our landscape safe.

When Autonomous Response stops a bad behavior, shutting down something that could be dangerous, it buys us time. It keeps everyone safe by automatically shutting down the behavior so we can really evaluate what happened. We wouldn’t have that without a 24-hour SOC. And it stairsteps our users back to where it is safe to go without stopping their whole work day.

AI threat analysis

We do all of this with a small but mighty technology team. So it has been critical that we are supported with the augmenting power of AI. We have a Security Operations SWAT Team and Darktrace has been a key extension of our team efforts. We rely on the Cyber AI Analyst like another team member.

The Darktrace Cyber AI Analyst is an AI-powered threat analyst. It’s like an extension of Darktrace’s analysts but supercharged with the speed and scale of AI. It has greatly influenced our workflow — supporting our staff by helping them more immediately triage what happens on our infrastructure.

The AI Analyst is another application of Darktrace’s unique machine learning. It can serve up a prioritized list of suspicious behavior that we can tackle and we can also be alerted to major events, even through our phones via the Mobile App. We keep Darktrace close at all times.

Protecting remote workers

Extending Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI to the endpoint gave us the chance to adjust to our remote network, because even now, not everyone is back in the office. As we untether from the corporate VPN, and move more and more into our SharePoint and Microsoft world, our day-to-day continues to shift. Darktrace has been profound in highlighting interesting behavior on our endpoint devices. For example, we know there has been a surge in crypto-mining activity on our infrastructure. We wouldn’t have caught that without Darktrace. We have eyes like never before.