Customer Success Case Study
A Fortune 100 Retailer’s Journey to Enhanced Data Security
Background
This success story reviews challenges, potential solutions and impactful business outcomes for a multinational retail operation. This company has over one-million employees and hundreds of millions of customers. They have a legacy and reputation for business leadership and technology innovation.
Because of the prominent standing of this company, they have compliance and regulatory obligations to many countries and laws. Also, with 100’s of thousands of employees and millions of customers, they have vast amounts of data to protect.
Technical Environment
Docker Containers: Services will be packaged and deployed as Docker containers, providing a consistent and portable deployment unit across different environments.
Google Cloud Storage Bucket: This cloud-based storage solution will be used to securely store and manage various types of documents, including images, text files, and other relevant data.
Azure SQL: A robust relational database service will be employed to store structured data, enabling efficient data retrieval and management.
Migration Scripts: To streamline database setup and ensure consistency across environments, the team will provide comprehensive migration scripts for creating and updating the database schema.
Kafka: A high-throughput, distributed messaging system will be utilized as a message broker, enabling efficient and reliable communication between different services within the system.
The global retailer’s challenges in a data-rich environment
The global retail company faced critical challenges related to managing and safeguarding sensitive information across its expansive and complex enterprise environment. With large volumes of data stored across platforms like Confluence, JIRA, ServiceNow, SharePoint, and Git repositories, the risks of exposing Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), and internal secrets were escalating with significant security vulnerabilities and risk.
The existing in-house secrets scanning solution, known as SecScan, was primarily focused on code scanning. It was developed by the company’s in-house technical team to scan for secrets; however, the solution was inefficient, often plagued with false positives, and blind to the context of what it was examining. The SecScan solution itself was a major challenge for the company—it wasted analysts' time, increased the likelihood of missed exposures, and significantly hindered the efficiency and accuracy of their security efforts.
The company recognized the importance of expanding SecScan capabilities beyond its limited scope.
These challenges required a transformative approach; one that could not only locate and identify sensitive content with greater accuracy and context, but operate at global scale. As data governance and regulatory expectations rose, the company aimed to proactively identify and mitigate risks associated with data exposure across their interconnected Confluence, JIRA, ServiceNow, and SharePoint platforms and systems.
Recognizing the critical need to mitigate risks and future-proof their security operations, the company sought an intelligent, automated, and easily maintainable solution that could counter the ever-evolving landscape of data security threats. Key requirements for their updated SecScan system included configurability for easy adaptation to emerging data types and sources, operation with limited human touchpoints, integration capabilities across their growing tech stack and ease of manageability of the solution.
A collaborative solution: The company’s in-house team and Infinite Ranges
Recognizing the limitations of the legacy system and the urgency of modernizing, the retail company called on Infinite Ranges to reimagine its approach to secrets and sensitive data detection. This collaboration aimed to deliver a managed outcome for the customer’s code and secrets scanner, fundamentally transforming its capabilities.
Infinite Ranges proposed a two-part solution. The core system would incorporate advanced AI-power to enhance data security by moving beyond the limitations of traditional pattern matching to a comprehensive and contextual understanding of the scanned data by using natural language processing (NLP). The second part of the proposed system would feature a modular, microservices architecture built with scalability, automation, and extensibility in mind. It would be capable of dynamically ingesting data from a variety of sources, normalizing that data into a common format, and scanning for secrets using a self-training machine learning model that could improve over time through user feedback.
Infinite Ranges embarked on a six-month engagement to develop a scalable architecture and an initial implementation focused on scanning Confluence for secrets using a Natural Language Processing (NLP) model. This innovative approach leveraged language processing to understand the context of information, enabling the system to identify and flag truly sensitive data while minimizing false positives.
Key design principles included the use of containerized services, RESTful APIs, and integration with the customer’s DevSecOps pipelines using technologies like Docker, Azure SQL, Kafka, and Python-based scanning services.
Another design principle included continuous improvement that allows for reinforcement training based on false positives to further enhance accuracy. The solution delivered by Infinite Ranges fully developed a new version of SecScan. This was implemented in a microservices architecture for ease of manageability and scalability. Key architectural components used ML/AI tools designed to scan for anomalous content in dynamically-discovered documents.
What differentiated this engagement was the full lifecycle support—Infinite Ranges would not only build the solution, but also transfer ownership, provide developer training, integrate DevOps pipelines, and produce reusable templates so the company’s internal teams could independently operate and extend the platform in the future.
Infinite Ranges—The chosen partner for a business critical initiative
Infinite Ranges was chosen not only for their technical credentials but also for their strategic approach and proven ability to deliver complex security solutions in high-stakes environments. Their agile delivery methodology, built on XP practices like pair programming and test-driven development, aligned well with the customer’s in-house engineering culture. More importantly, Infinite Ranges demonstrated a deep understanding of both the technology stack and the business context.
The Infinite Ranges project team was composed of security experts, architects, engineers, data scientists, and project managers. They collaborated tightly with the customer from the very start of the project with weekly sprint reviews, hands-on demos, and continuous communication to build trust and ensure alignment.
The engagement was structured with clear phases, from requirement gathering and code architecture to infrastructure development, DevSecOps, testing, application coding, and knowledge transfer. This ensured that the customer’s in-house teams would realize immediate value and understand metric-based benefits throughout the project’s journey.
Infinite Ranges employed robust XP/Agile software practices, including pair programming, test-driven development, and Kanban-style backlog management, ensuring a disciplined and efficient delivery process.
Beyond the core system, Infinite Ranges provided a holistic set of deliverables that empowered the customer for future development. This included framework-level source code components, annotation-based auto-configuration interfaces, project template code generation scripts, developer how-to guides, automated tests, and continuous-integration, continuous-development (CI/CD) pipelines. These components were designed to enable the customer’s development teams to, independently, create new architecturally compliant microservices with minimal effort—they were empowered to extend and evolve the system in-house.
The customer was impressed with the Infinite Ranges commitment to knowledge transfer, providing comprehensive documentation and training to the customer’s in-house developers on architectural patterns and the enhancement of the new solution with future AI, NLP, and ML advancements.
Tangible Results and Operational Transformation
The results of this engagement were transformative. The customer now has an advanced secrets management platform, capable of scanning not only code but also documents, images, and other content across various systems. This new platform modernized their security infrastructure and accelerated the path to the retirement of its first generation SecScan system.
The new microservice-based system can automatically pull data from multiple sources, convert it into a unified format, and run intelligent scans that distinguish between real threats and false alarms. With 80% test coverage and modular, independently deployable services, the platform is robust, reliable, and scalable.
Manual processes have been almost entirely eliminated. The system now automatically handles ingestion, standardization, and scanning—reducing the operational burden on the customer’s security and engineering teams. Analysts no longer waste time chasing false positives. The platform also supports extensibility, allowing the in-house developers to build and deploy new adapters, seekers, and transformers using pre-built templates and guides.
Though the financial impact has not been publicly disclosed, the anticipated benefits are substantial. By automating labor-intensive tasks, reducing risk exposure, and improving detection accuracy, protecting sensitive data, including passwords, gift card numbers, and bank account numbers, from exposure, The customer will ultimately save millions of dollars in avoided incidents, compliance costs, and efficiency gains.
Outlook and Future Opportunities
The global retailer’s new SecScan system lays the foundation for long-term security innovation. With a microservice-based architecture, AI-enabled scanning, and extensive internal enablement, the system is designed to evolve with future needs and provides a foundation that is easier to maintain and extend, crucial for long-term operational efficiency and adaptation to evolving threats. The internal teams are now equipped to add new scanning capabilities, refine the ML models, and expand coverage to additional platforms and document types.
Infinite Ranges left behind a roadmap of possible next steps for the customer to consider. Some of these enhancements and upgrades include: alternative disaster recovery plans, more robust error handling with Dead Letter Queues, and performance tuning across services. Another recommendation included regular audits and compliance checks. Regular reviews are vital to ensure adherence to industry standards and organizational policies, particularly concerning sensitive data and certificate usage. This also suggests that retention policies should be further defined to comprehend where sensitive information is collected and stored, which is essential for compliance with data privacy regulations.
There are also opportunities to integrate newer AI technologies, refine model training pipelines, and extend the platform into real-time monitoring environments.
Infinite Ranges remains a valued partner in the customer’s transformation journey. While the core implementation has concluded, the flexible design, training, and collaborative documentation have left the customer not only with a powerful tool—but with the operational independence to carry it forward.