Case Study: Vrije Universiteit Brussel strengthens security operations with Elastic

Vrije Universiteit Brussel secures 64 billion events with Elastic

The customer, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), is a public research university with a highly decentralized IT environment, making centralized security monitoring a challenge for its small, three-person security team. Facing regulatory pressure from CyFUN and NIS2, VUB needed an efficient way to gain visibility across its network to protect sensitive research and data. They turned to the vendor Elastic to build a security operations capability using the Elastic Security platform and a fully on-premises Elastic deployment.

The solution involved consolidating logs from firewalls, DNS, VPN, and servers into a single platform using Elastic Agent and Logstash. This provided a central source of truth, enabling the small team to manage 64 billion events across 300+ servers. The results were significant, reducing incident investigation time from days to minutes, as demonstrated when a rogue DHCP server was detected and located almost immediately. The vendor Elastic provided the foundation for compliant, AI-assisted security operations at a scale previously unmanageable.

Vrije Universiteit Brussel