Blue Zebra Insurance taps Fast50 firm Arinco for Microsoft Sentinel implementation

Microsoft partner and CRN Australia Fast50 company Arinco has delivered a Microsoft Sentinel implementation for Sydney-headquartered Blue Zebra Insurance (BZI).

Founded in 2017, BZI provides agencies and insurers with a Microsoft Azure-hosted digital platform for insurance policy administration.

The company underwrites more than $300 million in premiums and handles nearly 1.2 million quotes per year.

BZI engaged Arinco to deploy Sentinel, which took place over nine weeks from January to February 2024.

Arinco placed twenty-fourth in the 2023 CRN Fast50 and received the Resilience Award based on this performance and how frequently it has appeared in the Fast50 over the years. 

“We came on board to supplement BZI’s strong technical expertise with our own, having been recommended by Microsoft as a trusted partner,” said Dave Edge, cloud security architect at Arinco.

Deploying Microsoft technology and partnering with Arinco has allowed BZI to implement what its CTO Amar Roomi calls “best-in-class security” without needing to build a large internal team to develop its cybersecurity solutions.

“Sentinel is a sophisticated product, with a lot of data connectors and different playbooks, depending on your needs and priorities, but the deployment was made far less daunting with Arinco’s guidance,” said Roomi.

The implementation provided BZI with a centralised dashboard for security incident and response management, which provides visibility of security alerts, incidents, investigations and metrics in a single view.

Its ability to automate responses to security incidents has reduced incident response and resolution time by an average of 25 per cent and 50 percent respectively, Microsoft said.

“That automation capability within Sentinel really aligns with BZI’s proactive approach to cybersecurity, and my philosophy of ‘lazy protection’ by which I mean I want to be able to rely on the robust security frameworks embedded in our technology without having to reinvent the wheel," said Roomi.

"Our whole business is founded on a strong sense of automation and digital enablement and working with Sentinel was a natural fit.” 

BZI is using Microsoft Defender to identify and triage security threats across its identities, applications and devices, allowing the company to discern serious threats from false positives.

The company is also using Microsoft 365 E5 for risk-based access management and identity protection, vulnerability management, managing endpoint security baselines, data protection, and protection against email threats such as phishing. 

In addition, BZI has deployed Windows 365 Enterprise across its workforce and is deploying Microsoft Fabric to centralise its data management and unify data sources into a single data lake.