Securing More With Less: How River Island Scaled Security Without Increasing Headcount

When you’re a three-person security team responsible for one of the UK’s biggest retail chains - including its ecommerce platform and hundreds of stores - you can’t afford friction or inefficiency. 

Sunil Patel, Information Security Officer at River Island, knew his team needed an exposure management solution that was simple, effective, and easy to trust. 

With Intruder, they improved visibility of their attack surface and enabled other teams to remediate issues without security acting as a bottleneck - all while effortlessly giving the executive team confidence that security is under control.

We spoke with Sunil to hear how Intruder helped turn “do more with less” into more than a mantra.

The Challenge: A Small Team, Poor Visibility and High Friction Workflows

“It’s just me and two analysts - for over 200 stores.”

River Island’s lean InfoSec team is responsible for protecting an estate that includes an ecommerce platform, over 200 retail locations, a main distribution center, and head offices. Despite this scale, budgets are tight and hiring is frozen - no additional headcount is expected for at least 18 months.

Visibility was also a challenge. Without a clear picture of which assets were internet-facing, prioritizing risk became guesswork.

“The challenge we had was, what is exposing us to the internet? I only know what I know.”

The security tooling in place was also underutilized, with Sunil estimating they were getting just 5-6% of the possible value from some products. Manual workflows - notifying teams of vulnerabilities via email, managing them in spreadsheets, chasing dev teams - meant that critical and high priority vulnerabilities were not being resolved as quickly as they should have been.

Sunil’s priority was clear: understand their real risk and make security something that supports the business - not slows it down.

The Solution: Visibility, Automation, and Enablement 

Automating attack surface visibility 

One of the team’s biggest challenges was knowing exactly what services were internet-facing, and whether they posed a risk. 

With Intruder’s continuous network monitoring, the team stays on top of changes to their attack surface and gets notified if anything new or unexpected becomes accessible from the internet, such as login pages. 

This gives Sunil's team a clear, up-to-date view of what’s exposed, even as their environment changes, so the team can find and fix exposures before they can disrupt critical services. 

Proactive protection for emerging threats

When critical vulnerabilities like Log4j hit the headlines, most security teams scramble to figure out: Are we exposed? What do we need to fix? Who needs to know? For lean teams, this can mean dropping everything to triage - usually with a lot of manual effort.

Intruder takes that pressure off. Automated emerging threat scans check whether River Island’s assets are at risk as soon as new critical vulnerabilities are disclosed. It’s exactly the kind of proactive solution that lets Sunil’s team secure more with less - no constant threat monitoring or reactive scrambles required.

“When Log4j hit, our CIO asked if we were affected. I could tell him straight away: ‘We’re good - Intruder’s scanned for it and we’re in the clear.’”

From bottleneck to overseers 

Sunil didn’t want River Island’s security team to be a bottleneck - he wanted them to be enablers. 

“I want to take us out of the equation completely from a process perspective.”

With Intruder’s Jira integration, vulnerabilities are triaged straight to the right teams, so developers can act fast without waiting on InfoSec to chase or translate.

“We’re not the nagging manager anymore. We just monitor and make sure things are progressing.”

Instead of managing every fix, Sunil’s team works alongside the service delivery managers to stay informed, checking in only when needed.

Intruder’s clear severity ratings and simple remediation advice also make that possible - helping teams clearly understand what needs to be done.

This shift has saved time, reduced friction, and helped River Island’s security team scale its impact across the business - without being in the weeds.

Effortless reporting the CIO can trust

With Intruder’s reports, Sunil’s team now has a clear view of their external security posture. This has made leadership updates faster and easier. Instead of piecing together information from multiple tools, Sunil can report quickly and confidently.

“When my CIO asks where we stand, I can tell him straight away: no highs, no criticals, these issues are being worked on.”

That level of confidence has even reduced the need for regular check-ins.

“I told my CIO, ‘You don’t have many one-to-ones with me,’ and he laughed and said, ‘That’s a good thing - it means nothing’s broken. Intruder gives him the confidence that we’ve got it covered, so he doesn’t need to check in. That’s how I know things are working.”

More than a platform - a team you can count on

“I’ve worked with the big vendors - you’re just a cog in the machine. With Intruder, I feel like a customer, not a contract.”

For Sunil, Intruder stands out not just for its technical capabilities, but for the trust and reliability of the people behind the product. Rather than being just another vendor, Intruder has become a true partner.

“When the proverbial hits the fan, I know that the Intruder team are on the end of the phone. That’s worth more than 10% more functionality. Someone might say, ‘this other tool is cheaper.’ I say: that extra 20% is the tax I pay to work with decent, competent human beings. I’ll take that every time.”

Under pressure to streamline security processes? Book a demo to learn how Intruder can help.