Aarons

Aarons

Aaron’s Maintains Company Communication Standards On Slack With Nightfall

Aaron’s, Inc. (NYSE: AAN) is one of the nation’s largest retail providers of furniture, consumer electronics, home appliances, and accessories. Founded in 1955, the Kennesaw, Georgia-based firm offers lease and purchase solutions for customers across the United States and Canada. Aaron’s, Inc. has grown revenues to over $3.8 billion per year, with over 1,500 Company-operated and franchised stores.

Overview

‍Employees: Over 12,000
Stuart Lane, Information Security Engineer for Application Security

Challenge

With over 12,000 employees, Aarons was concerned with monitoring communications channels for inappropriate communications that could pose both HR or security risks.

Overview

With Nightfall, Aarons could leverage dozens of machine learning detectors to scan Slack channels automatically for the specific content and data policy violations they wanted to prevent.

Content inspection & moderation for one of the largest retailers

With thousands of employees spread across multiple time zones, the team at Aaron’s relies on Slack as their primary communication channel. Manual supervision of the company’s Slack channel proved to be impossible with rapid-fire messages occurring at all hours of the day.

Stuart Lane, Information Security Engineer for Application Security, recognized the potential hazard of data loss across Slack—particularly company information. “We wanted to implement a DLP solution to protect sensitive information while also reinforcing appropriate use of the platform,” Lane explains.

Since Slack lacks native DLP functionality, Lane had to find a solution that would provide robust protection, as well as the flexibility to handle the unique challenges faced by the Aaron’s team. Enter Nightfall.

“Nightfall gives us real-time visibility and immediate feedback on Slack.”
Stuart Lane
Head of Security and Compliance

Complete transparency and protection with Nightfall

Lane was able to deploy Nightfall’s DLP for Aaron’s Slack users immediately, without the need for fine-tuning or complicated setup. Powered by machine learning, Nightfall uses a three-step process—Discover, Classify, and Protect—to monitor the team’s Slack messages in real-time.

Nightfall scans for over 25 detectors, ranging from personally identifiable information (PII) to IP addresses. This ensures that both the internal company information and customer data are never in jeopardy.

In order to protect against inappropriate language on Slack, Lane also created custom rules that search Slack messages for inappropriate content. After flagging any potentially sensitive information, Nightfall gives users the option to manually quarantine the information or use automated workflows to enforce a security policy.

“The ability to customize our notification messages allows us to reinforce our Code of Conduct and Acceptable Use Policy,” Lane adds.

“Nightfall has allowed us to automate the detection and response of DLP in Slack. This has alleviated an impossible task of manually monitoring the platform."

Seamless integration, responsive customer service

Lane remarks that the integration has been “a great experience, allowing us to onboard Nightfall with low friction.” Nightfall integrates directly with SaaS applications and data infrastructure platforms, including GitHub, AWS, and Atlassian.

In addition to the platform’s ease of use, Lane also notes that Nightfall’s customer service has been outstanding. “The team has been very quick and efficient with responding to our questions and have even implemented specific needs that we recommended to Nightfall,” says Lane.