Western Union Achieves Global Security Visibility and Automation with Axonius
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Western Union is one of the world’s leading financial services companies, enabling individuals and businesses to send and receive money quickly and securely. With operations in over 200 countries and territories and hundreds of thousands of agent locations worldwide, Western Union processes millions of transactions each day. Protecting customer trust and maintaining compliance with international standards is a core part of its business mission.
Western Union first deployed Axonius over five years ago with a focus on cyber hygiene: ensuring antivirus coverage, monitoring vulnerabilities, and feeding asset data into Splunk. Today, Western Union uses 38 Axonius adapters to aggregate, normalize, and correlate data from across the enterprise.
Key Challenges
Fragmented visibility: Data lives across many tools, each with a partial view. AVM tools show endpoints, but not users. Other tools focus on vulnerabilities, identities or other security controls. No single source ties everything together.
Ephemeral cloud assets: In cloud environments, new machines spin up by the hour and disappear just as fast. Without full visibility, there is no reliable way to ensure security agents and controls are consistently applied.
Manual effort: Without automation, even basic workflows consume valuable engineering time. Ticket creation, coverage validation, and reporting are repetitive and resource intensive.
Compliance: With PCI, SOC, and audits for multiple countries recurring regularly, the team needs to demonstrate coverage. Validation of EUC policy compliance, by validating endpoints encryption and security controls across a large, distributed environment.
M&A complexity: Integrating newly acquired environments requires fast discovery and validation of security posture, a process that can take months without a unified view.
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Hear firsthand how Western Union:
- Aggregates asset data across cloud, on-premises, and SaaS environments to create a single source of truth.
- Uses AWS’s scale, reliability, and advanced services to integrate and enrich security data.
- Leverages Axonius to automate asset intelligence, accelerate decision-making, and empower teams to focus on what matters most.
Axonius isn’t just security, it’s visibility for the whole enterprise.
Moving Money, Managing Trust
For Western Union’s cybersecurity engineering operations team, visibility is more than a metric, it’s the foundation for protecting a global enterprise.
“How do you protect something you can’t see?” said Douglas Salazar, Engineering Operations Manager at Western Union.
Together with colleague Victor Ureña, Douglas manages engineering operations across global IT infrastructure that spans traditional data centers, AWS, Oracle, and Google Cloud. Their mission: deliver reliable, real-time visibility to every user, device, and security control across the company. Douglas and Victor aren’t just managing cybersecurity operations; they’re protecting the backbone of a financial services giant that moves money across hundreds of countries daily. For them, visibility isn’t just a metric, it’s a requirement.
The only way to gain visibility into ephemeral AWS devices was through Axonius. We went from 92% to 99% coverage.
The High Stakes of Global Visibility
Western Union’s IT estate is as complex as its global reach. With multiple data centers, hybrid cloud environments, and hundreds of thousands of endpoints, visibility gaps were inevitable. When Douglas joined Western Union, agent security coverage was ~85% reported via Axonius. With help of Axonius team we tune the queries, and we reached a +90 coverage. Tickets to the support team to install security agents were submitted manually, adding hours of overhead. After Axonius implemented the Service Now automation we were able to create all the tickets needed with no effort. This makes our compliance to Jump to 98%.
Audit preparation means pulling data from multiple sources, now with Axonius we simplified the process as we have all the data in a single location.
“I came from a company where we used Excel because there was no single pane of glass,” Douglas recalled. “At Western Union, AXONIUS provided a smarter way to see all assets, correlate them, and make decisions quickly”.
Consequences
The implications of these challenges are clear. Without a comprehensive source of truth, the team risks:
Slower response times when investigating incidents, resolving access issues or even answering daily management enquiries.
Slower audit evidence collection.
Operational inefficiency, where engineers are tied up in manual tasks rather than strategic projects like Zero Trust or M&A integrations.
As Douglas emphasized, “We are not just a cost center, we are a value provider. Our role is to keep the company secure and resilient, and we need better visibility to do that effectively”.
Solutions
Western Union selected Axonius as its cybersecurity asset intelligence platform, beginning with a focus on cyber hygiene and gradually expanding into technology teams as the source of truth.
Step One: Establish cyber hygiene
The initial scope focused on ensuring antivirus, vulnerability and log collection agents coverage across workstations and servers.
Step Two: Expand visibility enterprise-wide
Over time, the deployment scaled to 38 adapters connected to Axonius spanning:
Workstations, servers, and networks
AWS and other cloud infrastructure
Certificates and encryption status
Local user accounts
Security tools including CrowdStrike, Active Directory, and Netskope
Step Three: Automate workflows
ServiceNow integration replaced manual ticketing. Automated actions now validate controls, trigger policy enforcement, and update asset inventories in real time.
Step Four: Address ephemeral cloud environment devices
With a stable compliance in 99% we decided to enforce the policies to other devices. This caused our compliance to fall again to 92%. Working with Axonius and the cloud security team, the engineers-built scripts to ensure ephemeral cloud machines had security agents attached in a matter of hours. This brought coverage up to 99%, even for instances that lived only minutes or hours.
The only way to gain visibility into these devices is through Axonius... Now we can see them closer to real time, apply controls.
Step Five: Enable cross-team adoption
Today, multiple teams beyond security, including network, compliance, and operations, rely on Axonius as their trusted source of asset intelligence.
A Single Source of Truth for Global Enterprise
With Axonius, Western Union has transformed its cybersecurity operations:
99% Asset Coverage across all environments, including ephemeral cloud instances.
50% Reduction in manual workload. Victor now spends half his time on strategic projects instead of manual asset management.
Faster audits with automated dashboards supporting PCI, SOC, and specific compliance and regulation from different countries.
M&A agility, rapidly discovering and securing assets in newly acquired or integrated environments.Cross-team collaboration, with Axonius serving as a single pane of glass for multiple teams beyond Cybersecurity.
Visibility as a Business Enabler
For Western Union, visibility isn’t just about data, it’s about trust. Every endpoint, cloud instance, and digital connection represents a customer depending on them to move money safely across the world. By adopting Axonius, Western Union didn’t just modernize cybersecurity; they redefined what operational clarity means for a global enterprise.
With one source of truth uniting IT, security, and compliance, the team now moves faster, audits easier, and collaborates better. Manual work has given way to automation, freeing engineers to focus on innovation instead of maintenance. Coverage gaps that once required hours of troubleshooting now close themselves in real time.
In an environment where every second counts, Axonius helps Western Union stay ahead, not just reacting to threats, but continuously improving the way they secure, support, and serve millions of people around the world.
It’s not just about security, it’s about enabling better ways for the business to function.
Western Union’s story proves that visibility isn’t a destination. It’s a continuous advantage, one that empowers people, accelerates progress, and strengthens the trust that moves the world.
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