Best practices from Walmart’s security operations center

Walmart had total revenue of $611.3 billion last year, has 2.1 million employees and 10,500 storefronts. It faces a spectrum of threats, and no one is more aware of that than the company’s Vice President for Security Operations Jason O’Dell. At NRF PROTECT, O’Dell discussed how Walmart deals with those threats and the complexities of maintaining a team to do that.

“It takes three things,” O’Dell said in the conversation with Sam Sabin, a cybersecurity reporter for Axios. “It takes a village. It takes automation. And it takes constant innovation.” It also takes a team — in this case, a system of teams at Walmart. All are on Walmart’s side, but in their day-to-day lives they might function as wily and dangerous opponents.

Describing Walmart’s operations from a functional perspective, O’Dell said a security operations center analyst is part of Walmart’s SOC office. “They’re our front line of defense — they do initial triage and also make some initial decisions associated with incoming risk.”

As part of that, the scene engineering team is responsible for consuming 7 trillion data points currently, he said. “We also have our threat hunting team, and they consume data in different ways than the stock analyst team does.”

When there’s an incident, the SOC’s cyber intel  team will give an indication that there has been a compromise of some kind and will also look at tactics.

“All this stuff happens at once,” he said, adding that the cyber-intel team could spot a new activity and target it for containment and eradication. While this is going on, the so-called “red team” — an in-house group that studies hostile behavior — will  be emulating what the bad guys appear to be doing. As an experiment, to see if it works. Meanwhile, the “blue team” is hard at work trying to counter the threat.

Toward the end of the session, Sabin and O’Dell fell into a discussion of the online world — how to make it safer, and the challenge both culture and technology create for people entering, working in and in general dealing with that world. Sabin asked how O’Dell continues to find talent for an industry so urgently in need of it.

“It’s tough,” O’Dell said. “The market is tight, and the competition for talent is fierce. Culture — I’m right with Peter Drucker on this — trumps strategy. Generalists are at an advantage. And we need options for technologists.”

Walmart is providing some options, not just for technologists but for a lot of people, through what the company calls LBU — Live Better U. The company will pay 100% of college tuition and books for associates enrolled in programs that will further their careers at Walmart.