Case study

How Tines saves OpenTable 40 hours of work per week

Highlights

  • Reservation system for the hospitality industry
  • Seats more than 1 billion people per year

“If it has an API, Tines can integrate with it.”

About OpenTable 

OpenTable, part of Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: BKNG), powers reservations for the hospitality industry. OpenTable’s software seats more than 1 billion people per year and helps more than 60,000 restaurants, bars, wineries, and other venues attract guests, manage capacity, improve operations and maximize revenue.

What’s the challenge? 

OpenTable’s security team keeps the company’s staff safe online. The team’s workload is increased by handling the security of the company’s web apps, too. Internal company security is something that became more important than ever in the spring of 2020 when employees started working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The security team needed a tool to cut down the amount of time they spent on every incident. Before using Tines, they used to spend a lot of time handling incident response, looking at alerts, and making sure that OpenTable wasn’t under attack or didn't have malware in its systems.

Each alert would take between 30 and 90 minutes to handle, and if they got too many, it would create a backlog, delaying the rest of their workload.

Why Tines? 

OpenTable tested some automation solutions on the market but found they would have needed one person on the security team focused full-time on managing and maintaining the ecosystem around them.

They chose Tines because it requires very little time and attention to keep it doing exactly what they need it to do, helping them work more efficiently and giving them more time to focus on other tasks. And when resources are stretched due to a situation like a pandemic, that can be critically important.

The security team also appreciated the flexibility of creating automated workflows in a short amount of time, and Tines’ responsiveness in working to modify the platform to suit their requirements.

Joel Perez-Sanchez, a security engineer at OpenTable, explains how Tines has helped the company keep its staff secure at a challenging time for everyone.

Tines has helped us do more with a small team during a difficult period for the whole restaurant trade. The pandemic changed the dynamic of the threat field, because suddenly everyone was working remotely. Working from home opens businesses up to additional threats, as security teams are less able to monitor activity of employees’ home networks. This put more demands on the team, as we had to rapidly rethink our approach to keeping the company safe.

"The thing we like about Tines is the flexibility of the product. We can hook it up to any of our tools. Rather than having to buy a specific tool that works with Tines, it works with whatever we already have. If it has an API, Tines can integrate with it."

Joel Perez-Sanchez

Security Engineer, OpenTable

Whether it’s EDR, traffic behavior analysis, firewall management, IDS, phishing simulations, or anything else we use, Tines is very easy to plug into everything, get the alerts we want, and have it process them. That takes hours off our work. Even preparing the incident tickets used to take 30 minutes sometimes, and now Tines does that for us really well, without us having to lift a finger.

For example, I’ve set it up so that when a user reports a phishing email, Tines will go in and scrape all the data we need, check with VirusTotal, URLhaus, UrlScan, and others, and then present all that information to us in our ticketing system.

After just a short period using Tines, we found it saved us 40 hours of work per week. It essentially saves us the workload of one person. And during uncertain times, that’s more important than ever.

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