CKE Restaurants, Inc.

Adam Morton is the Director of Engineering at CKE Restaurants. His role in the company is to oversee the systems, network, and telecom teams. He has been in the IT industry for 30 years as a strategist and an IT leader. He aims to streamline and propel the business, with prime technology, to reach newer heights.

What Are Some Of The Challenges You Face While Upholding Security In The Organization’s Networks, And What Measures Have You Taken For The Same?

Security is a big challenge in the networking industry, making it difficult for companies to keep track of the people using their networks. Traditionally, companies could push down GPOs (Group Policy Objects) and patches for the endpoints.

Today, when we have people off the network who don't connect to the VPN or any local network, that becomes a more significant challenge. They don't get the GPOs from the Microsoft Active Directory that we need them to have. We can push some of the Windows patches down by having an RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management) tool. We have recently introduced a product requiring them to connect to the VPN before they can do anything within the network. These users can't get on the internet; they can't do anything from a network perspective until they connect to the VPN. This forces them to get on the VPN and be on our local network, helping us push down the proper GPOs that are needed. This product has a pre-log which detects an active internet connection when a computer is turned on, regardless of the connection being wireless, wired or via certificate-based authentication.

What Popular Technologies Help Your Clients With Networking Problems Or Make Them More Secure And Simpler To Use?

There are a lot of security products out there. Over the past few years, we've seen heightened security awareness. We rely on Palo Alto and its Prisma Access product. Many people have new AI integrations that help find those zero contain it. We do what we call tabletops. We go through scenarios of such issues that might happen and be ready with our plan of action.

“We Work Hard To Respond Fast, Mitigate A Security Breach And Contain It. We Go Through Scenarios Of Such Issues That Might Happen And Be Ready With Our Plan Of Action”

What are the practices you take to educate the users about networking practices, or being safe while using the system?

We have cyber security training that people have to go through every year.

A video explains what we see that can be identified as fraud or harmful. We do phishing tests to see the number of day vulnerabilities, which is a big scare too. We've got these attacks that people are launching that we've never seen before. Palo Alto does a good job of tracking suspicious activity, monitoring endpoint protection, and all kinds of security requirements. There are instances where an email is sent which are too good to be true, and users click on it. This creates a ransomware issue, so having an endpoint protection product is good. We have our plan ready for when disaster happens. We work hard to respond fast, mitigate the situation and used in an email and the email address. When such things do not meet the basic content requirements in an email, the file must not be opened. A call or text from a random number sharing or asking for irrelevant information must be reported. There are difficult to handle or avoidable situations, but we try our best to keep our users educated about their safety and security.

Do You Have Any Advice For Industry Network Architects Or Network Engineers?

The network space is moving towards automation. In today's times, building up automation skills is a necessity. Manual work requires a lot of time and effort, and to ease the process, and automation is needed. Along with this, keeping up with the current technologies is the next thing to work upon, as it is an ever-changing industry. Technological developments happen every minute, and one needs to be aware of the same.