Securing the Street: Supporting Sesame Workshop's Mission

By Behan Venter, CTO, Hudson Cloud Systems

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street, has spent more than fifty years educating and inspiring children around the world. Behind that beloved brand is a complex technology ecosystem that must stay secure, available, and resilient. That's where Hudson came in.

Our relationship with Sesame Workshop spans several years and multiple phases of engagement, starting with engineering and consulting work in 2018 and evolving into a fully managed security partnership. Throughout, our goal has remained simple: to protect Sesame Workshop's mission-critical systems without ever slowing them down.

From engineering to full visibility

We began in 2018 with a hands-on engineering engagement to deploy ExtraHop hardware and software, apply firmware updates, and integrate the platform with our Security Operations Center. We built customized dashboards, alerts, and playbooks tailored to Sesame's departments and use cases. Paul Daubman led much of that work, setting up bundles, triggers, and tuning policies to match their environment.

We also planned for SOC integration early. That preparation led to the launch of a dedicated SOC-as-a-Service program, delivering continuous monitoring and response capabilities backed by our team of escalation specialists and platform engineers. The service provided ongoing SOC coverage and engineering leadership for incident forensics, remediation, and problem management, all designed to meet the unique needs of Sesame Workshop's IT operations.

Maintaining reliability and continuity

As the partnership matured, we continued to manage the Extrahop RevealX platform, performing version upgrades (7.7.1 at the time) and ensuring that monitoring and detection stayed consistent with our best-practice deployments. We supported annual renewals and provided ongoing consulting and technical support through 2024, ensuring Sesame Workshop's infrastructure remained secure and reliable.

Throughout these cycles, we worked closely with Sesame Workshop's IT leadership team, including the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, and the Senior Director of Infrastructure and Operations. Together, we aligned priorities, handled contract updates, and kept systems performing at peak reliability. The collaboration extended beyond tools and alerts; it was about ensuring continuity, visibility, and confidence across their environment.

Supporting a mission that matters

We're proud of the technical outcomes, but even more proud of the mission they support. Sesame Workshop reaches children in over 150 countries, delivering educational content that changes lives. Our role in keeping their systems secure, connected, and resilient means their creative and educational teams can stay focused on what they do best.

Security and infrastructure may not appear in the credits, but they're critical to every frame of success behind the scenes. For Sesame Workshop, that means the show can go on safely, reliably, and uninterrupted.