Overview
YKK solves the most complex fastening and attaching challenges. Since YKK’s founding in Tokyo in 1934, the company has continuously set industry standards for quality, innovation, and sustainability in the production of zippers, plastic hardware, hook & loop fasteners, webbing tapes, and snaps and buttons. YKK brings the engineering expertise and machining and manufacturing resources to create new solutions and deliver at scale anywhere in the world, including for the most demanding and highly regulated industries, such as automotive, medical, apparel and safety. Learn more at ykkamericas.com.
Protecting a Global Supply Chain
From Nike and The North Face to Timberland and Toyota, brands worldwide count on YKK, the world’s largest maker of zippers and fasteners.
Headquartered in Japan, YKK operates in nearly 70 countries, producing 10 billion zippers annually for everything from apparel and outdoor gear to car interiors and spacesuits.
“Globally, we produce enough zippers to go around the world 80 times per year,” said Rod Goldsmith, Regional Cybersecurity Leader at YKK Americas, which alone manufactures seven million zippers a day.
Now more than 90 years old, YKK continues to push product innovation with solutions like AquaSeal, a watertight zipper used in dive suits and other high-performance gear.
Likewise, the company’s cybersecurity must be just as impenetrable.
“We’re an important part of our customers’ supply chain,” Goldsmith said. “A security incident and data loss could impact our ability to deliver products to customers, our bottom line, and people across the globe. It’s imperative to have a reliable security partner.”
SentinelOne: A Unified View
When the YKK Americas team weighed their two legacy security solutions against industry best practices, they fell short.
“We ran tests to detect threats and I wasn’t happy with the results,” Goldsmith said. “It was hard to determine which of our systems had an agent on it or if agents were working.”
For guidance, YKK looked at Gartner and other trusted sources in cybersecurity, ultimately leading them to SentinelOne for broad coverage of endpoints and networking gear, and in the future, possibly to include identity and cloud assets.
Goldsmith liked the ability to seamlessly ingest logs from diverse applications — enabling broader visibility, faster detection, and more informed response across environments.
Then, SentinelOne’s Wayfinder MDR and Digital Forensics & Incident Response (DFIR) add peace of mind with investigation and remediation.
“SentinelOne’s MDR and DFIR teams often remediate alerts on our behalf and advise us on internal actions to improve our environment,” Goldsmith said. “Being able to rely on experts to resolve incidents and do deep-dive investigations when needed has been incredibly valuable.”
Industry Leading Endpoint Coverage
YKK Americas ramped up quickly with SentinelOne Singularity, beginning with understanding their assets. With Singularity’s discovery feature, they see a real-time view of devices on the network and any gaps — improving coverage of PCs and servers.
“If you don’t know what you have, it’s hard to protect it,” Goldsmith said. “Prior to SentinelOne, our endpoint protection was below the industry accepted average. Now, we are above industry average for coverage. That’s very much thanks to SentinelOne and the agent discovery feature.”
The team is currently extending coverage to mobile devices, a capability that YKK found missing in other security platforms and swayed its choice of SentinelOne.
Purple AI: Autonomous Threat Detection
In Purple AI, YKK Americas gained an autonomous AI security analyst that investigates threats, summarizes incidents, and automates responses — reducing the time to detect and remediate attacks.
AI automation also cuts research time and the back-and-forth communication between departments. Compared to their previous security solution, Singularity saves the team about four hours a week in identifying and securing systems that need protection.
“Over my 14 years in cybersecurity, I’ve dealt with many big players. SentinelOne gives us results a lot faster when querying data,” Goldsmith added. AI SIEM likewise speeds analysis and response by delivering alerts in real time — a level of firewall monitoring their previous solution lacked. They also extended their log collection and storage so they can investigate months later, if needed.
“With AI SIEM, we have continuous visibility of our internet-facing activity and take immediate action on anything that’s trying to breach our firewalls,” Goldsmith said. “If we don’t have the logs, we can’t investigate. Being able to rely on AI SIEM for that collection helps us now and will in the future.”
