Started in 1980 in the northern Kentucky garage of Henry and Elaine Fischer, Fischer Homes is now the 31st largest home builder in the country, with close to 700 employees across five states. “My team’s mission is to enhance safety, manage evolving threats, and empower our growing employee workforce,” says Troy Riegsecker, the company’s infrastructure manager.

Cybersecurity is a priority for Fischer Homes—but like many businesses, human error is a top challenge. From training employees not to click on suspicious links to ensuring all devices are regularly updated, Riegsecker’s team works hard to reduce risk. However, as the company grows and encounters a rise in evolving threats and zero-day exploits, keeping the organization safe from threats becomes increasingly difficult.

In 2020, Fischer Homes experienced a zero-day exploit and realized that their current security solution was improperly configured by a third-party. “We quickly resolved the incident with the help of a Trender from the IR team who remained in contact with me for 8 hours straight, troubleshooting and recommending solutions until the issue was resolved,” says Riegsecker. While competing home builders were down for 10 days as a result of the attack, Fischer Homes was back up and running within 72 hours. This experience provided Riegsecker with the foresight to strengthen their existing security posture with additional Trend solutions.

“Trend Micro stepped up and ensured that our environment was fully optimized. When you have people who ensure you are fully protected, why would you want to leave?” says Riegsecker.

Fischer Homes added Trend Vision One™ with XDR and Trend Micro™ Cloud App Security to bolster the existing deployment. “With Trend Vision One in place, Fischer Homes has a complete view of anomalies, threats, and statuses across its entire IT environment,” says Riegsecker.

Trend Cloud One™ for workload security and networks was also added to protect cloud workloads and lock down Fischer Homes’ AWS and Microsoft Azure deployments. It also allows for geofiltering, which ensures that they know everything that exists in their inventory.

“Trend Cloud One™ - Network Security was a game changer. While we had security protection, we weren’t stopping actual attacks. Trend Cloud One scans everything and removes threats, and we went from 70 to 80 alerts overnight to just one or two,” says Riegsecker.

“Purchasing via AWS Marketplace has also been very simple for us, giving us more flexibility and helping us to plan our budget better because we know exactly how much it will cost.”

"Trend Service One enables us to focus on high value projects and leaves security to the experts to handle. With Managed XDR services as part of the package my team now has the freedom to focus on other priorities."

Troy Riegsecker
Infrastructure Manager, Fischer Homes

“Fischer Homes has configured filters to prevent foreign malicious actors from accessing our systems. With Trend’s security solutions, we have now automated much of our threat scanning, detection, and mitigation, freeing up staff time and resources,” says Riegsecker. “Reporting has also improved, and we no longer spend valuable time investigating an onslaught of false positive alerts. With better visibility into the company’s IT environment, we can stay on top of threats and help empower the Fischer Homes workforce to succeed.”

“Since we’ve implemented attack surface risk management with Trend Vision One we’ve been able to see our blind spots by continuously identifying unknown and unmanaged assets across our environment, significantly improving our security posture. This solution has saved our team many hours of manual risk monitoring and detections. By leveraging automated risk remediation options, we can stay many steps ahead of potential threats,” says Riegsecker.

“With Trend Vision One, the Risk Index is one of the key things I look at every day. I use the Executive Dashboards every day, and if there are any XDR detections, I can just click and drill into it and share the reporting with our executive team. Our employees can work safely and be productive without worrying about their devices being compromised,” says Riegsecker.

The Trend experience has been so positive that Riegsecker is now managing Fischer Homes’ security via the Trend Service One™ solution. “Trend Service One enables us to focus on high value projects and leaves security to the experts to handle. With Managed XDR services as part of the package my team now has the freedom to focus on other priorities.” He also plans to put Trend in charge of adding an intrusion detection system (IDS) to the company’s current firewall. Riegsecker anticipates being more efficient and effective because he knows Trend Micro is a partner he can rely on. “With Trend helping us to stay on top of things, I feel like we can really accelerate our business because we are staying ahead of the threats,” says Riegsecker.