Customer Success Story: Wyndham Hotels & Resorts

My name is Joe Godhelp. I’m the vice president of cybersecurity at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts. Our team today covers a number of different areas including incident response, threat intelligence, vulnerability management, cloud security, application security, and of course our security operations center.

Mike Francis, senior manager of what we call cybersecurity advanced threat. So basically, I oversee the functions of incident response, threat intelligence, and detection engineering.

Over the last few years, we’ve worked on a number of different initiatives with GuidePoint Security. Most recently has been our EDR project, which GuidePoint helped us evaluate number of different EDR vendors. Massive, massive undertaking, for our organization.

I’d say the biggest thing GuidePoint provided with that EDR project was guidance around our success criteria and evaluation criteria. What exactly to focus on as we’re thinking about this bake off and what exactly we want to test, how we would test it and what the expected outcomes would be. And then focusing on things that would be important, not just to us, but have been important to other hospitality peers or other companies that were similar to us in our in our needs.

For something that has so much visibility at Wyndham, this was super important to us to make sure that the the outcome here was one hundred percent certain for us. I think partnering, with Guidewind Security and our team to make sure that everything came out perfectly was was really important to us. And, again, especially for someone who has has so much visibility and and for a project that had such wide international reach for us, We wanna make sure that it was, you know, no no stone stone left unturned for making sure that we we had everything we needed. Another big initiative that GuidePoint Security has helped us with has been our, data lake and soft technologies.

So that’s something that, GuidePoint continues to be actively involved in with professional services to help us to continue to grow and mature in those areas. And so that’s something we continue to watch and like what we’ll be reevaluating in the next year. So now that we’ve wrapped up our EDR project, the next thing we’re gonna be looking to is our API security program and enhancing and and improving what we’re already doing today. So we’re working with GuidePoint Security to help us evaluate vendor selection, success criteria, and ultimately where’s the best place for Wyndham to be, when we conclude that project.

Many, many years ago Wyndham had a number of different suppliers and partners, and over the years we’ve tried to reduce that number, whittle down that number, to as as few as possible and and in the end GuidePoint, made that cut and and continues to to help us today. And, we’ve been partners with GuidePoint for over ten years now.

The relationships I’ve built with GuidePoint over the the ten years I’ve been working with them, have been consistent. They’ve definitely matured more from a from a business relationship into a friendship with some with some of the folks there.

So over the years, GuidePoint Security has been a phone call away, a text message away. And for any of the problems, any of the the challenge areas for us, GuidePoint’s been a great partner to help us make decisions, help test things out, help evaluate things that we’ve never heard of before. And I think that has really continued the trust as as we’ve been able to execute those projects and and really seen the results and and in the end worked out really well. At Wyndham we always talk about really partners of our program and extensions of our team.

There’s lots of folks we work with that we don’t speak to often, who only come calling when payment is due. And I think we’ve really grown the relationship to a point with with GuidePoint Security where it could be a weekend, a night, you know, a holiday, and we’re we’re texting, we’re calling. And I think that’s really important to us where when we when we talk about vendors who if we needed support, we’re not sure who to call. GuidePoint’s really always that that call away.

And not just the one eight hundred number, like, you know, our account team.

You know, I make jokes that, you know, Jason, our account manager, should just be given a badge in any amount of times that he he comes into the office. But it’s it’s being that trusted advisor just knowing, hey, if I have this problem or or work towards a solution with something, I can I can give them a call, shoot them an email, and they’ll be there?

So I’d say one one thing we we do rely on GuidePoint security for is to bring us the that bleeding edge technology of of what’s coming next. And from what we understand the the the reach that GuidePoint has in different companies, there’s really good understanding of what other organizations are using both in our industry and outside our industry, and maybe something that would work well for Wyndham.

The one thing that’s that’s apparent to me is is the depth and breadth of knowledge. We very much view GuidePoint as an extension of our team.