Steve Madden Designs a Signature Look for Security

Fashioning a global brand

The Steve Madden story is the stuff of legends. The designer first sold his shoes out of the trunk of his car to trendy Manhattan boutiques. More than three and a half decades later, Steve Madden has become a $2.7-billion global fashion brand, known for bold, trend-driven footwear and accessories, and for rapidly turning runway ideas into products on shelves. The business has expanded dramatically, now spanning more than 400 retail and outlet stores, e-commerce, wholesale, and manufacturing across nearly 80 countries.

Every new region, channel, and partner introduced more networks, systems, data, and end points to manage and secure. In the high-paced and fickle world of fast fashion, everything ultimately must work to support a consistently high-quality experience for consumers. “At the end of the day, it is the Steve Madden brand across the world, and we need to protect that brand,” says Kamran Siddique, the company’s chief information security officer and head of IT infrastructure. “We have to have visibility to see if anything is going wrong.”

When Siddique joined Steve Madden in 2023, that level of security oversight and control was increasingly hard to achieve. The attack surface sprawled across regions and business units. In addition to a global retail footprint with physical and digital channels, Steve Madden operates wholly owned international subsidiaries, joint ventures with infrastructure managed by a third party, as well as complex supply chains, product development, manufacturing, and distribution warehouses.

Compounding the situation, security and infrastructure teams operated with minimal coordination. Limited staff and disconnected workflows meant the capabilities of more than 40 networking and security tools went underutilized and had to be monitored independently. Outdated network gear delivered little telemetry to monitor performance or risk, so the team often only learned about issues after the fact. “Basically, we were driving blind,” says Siddique.

To enable the ongoing growth of Steve Madden, its IT operating model had to transform and adopt a modern approach to unifying security and networking.

Shared responsibility

A critical first step for Siddique was to merge the lean security and network operations. Analysts and engineers began sharing information, with security staff learning more about network behavior and infrastructure experts pursuing formal security certifications. Over time, the two New York City-based teams have progressively worked together more closely, jointly reviewing availability and security signals.

Siddique says the new approach represents an important cultural shift within Steve Madden, in which protecting customer data and keeping systems running are no longer siloed tasks. “Security is everyone’s responsibility,” says Siddique. “The best security is the one that you really cannot see but is happening in the background to give our customers confidence that we’re taking every step to secure their data.”

An ideal opportunity to apply the coordinated approach emerged in support of a new retail strategy. A new SaaS‑based point‑of‑sale (POS) platform was planned to modernize checkout and enable mobile selling via iPads, while also tying into richer loyalty and omnichannel experiences through integrations with third parties and social media.

To make it all work, Siddique and his team launched a broad refresh of store network infrastructure, standardizing 100% of its fleet on Cisco Meraki—more than 3,000 devices across retail locations.

The replacement of aging hardware has ensured more robust Wi-Fi coverage and secure paths for sensitive transaction data as it moves between stores, cloud services, analytics platforms, and other integration points. With Meraki cloud management, the lean, centralized team at Steve Madden now configures and manages all its sites remotely, while local staff handle simple on-site tasks such as plugging in new devices.

Seeing the whole picture

Upgrading the retail infrastructure delivered another crucial benefit: unprecedented visibility. With consistent configurations on Cisco Meraki MX security appliances at every store, rich network telemetry is fed into Cisco XDR and natively integrated in the Meraki dashboard—enabling unified threat detection and response across the entire operation.

Steve Madden’s lean team of network and security analysts now gathers data from the network, endpoints, cloud workloads, email security, identity systems, and unmanaged devices in a single 24x7 monitoring platform.

“Looking at a holistic view on a single pane of glass is very, very important for us,” emphasizes Bakul Singhal, lead information security architect at Steve Madden. “Customer data hits many different integration points. We want to secure it at each one of those points and systems.”

Investigating a potential threat used to require switching between multiple tools, each with its own interface and logs. Analysts labored over assembling evidence, trying to manually connect clues, with inconsistent results.

“Cisco XDR integrates across network, endpoints, cloud, various data sources, and other platforms, which provides a single, cohesive view enriched with security intelligence,” says Singhai. “This brings together users, devices, timelines, and behaviors in context, allowing my team to quickly understand what’s happening, prioritize real threats, and respond without switching between tools.” Intuitive visualizations also make it easy for security analysts to grasp how an issue originated and what is impacted. “When dealing with a security issue, the more telemetry you have and the more correlation you can build, the more confidently you can respond,” he adds. "Having everything in one place helps us move faster and stay effective, which is critical for a small team managing a global environment.”

As Cisco XDR detects incidents, it uses AI to prioritize those that are most urgent and generate recommended actions such as “isolate this endpoint” or “block these IPs,” which analysts can execute from the same screen. The UI walks an analyst in plain language through the entire attack chain stage by stage—execution, command‑and‑control, exfiltration—so they quickly understand what happened.

“In a single platform, we’re getting near-real-time visibility, as well as the support to investigate incidents and respond,” says Siddique. “It’s been a game changer.”

Secret sauce

For the unified approach to succeed, however, Steve Madden’s analysts need to correlate as many signals as possible, from a variety of tools and services. With its lean team, ease of integration was essential, and Siddique is pleased with what they accomplished in short order. “We have almost two dozen integrations into [Cisco] XDR, and it wasn’t rocket science. We were not forced to change some of the established platforms already working well,” he says. “[Cisco] XDR is the secret sauce that brought everything together.”

Automation is enabling Singhal and his team to operate with greater speed and consistency at scale. They are developing automated playbooks with routine containment and remediation actions that can be executed automatically, which frees up limited resources to focus on more complex investigations and emerging threats. “In retail, we have to stay cost conscious. We have a small team and it’s crucial that only the most meaningful threats are escalated to us,” says Singhal

Looking ahead, Singhal sees AI as a critical component in staying ahead of emerging threats. “Attackers are leveraging AI to launch more sophisticated and persistent attacks,” he says. “It’s essential that we defend and respond at machine speed and scale to effectively counter them.”

By combining richer telemetry, better correlations, and increasing automation, his team has gained confidence that their unified system will transform data signals into effective incident detections and consistent responses.

Siddique knows they need to be ready to adapt. “Business is not static,” he acknowledges. “We need to be able to respond quickly to any business need.”

As Steve Madden opens new stores and deepens relationships with manufacturing and distribution partners, the foundation of Cisco Meraki with XDR will support that growth. The retailer’s small, specialized group of security and network analysts are newly empowered to protect the Steve Madden brand wherever and however it evolves in the global fashion business.