Leading bank transforms digitalization journey with AlgoSec

Background

The bank is a full-service commercial bank headquartered in India. It offers a wide range of banking and financial products for corporate and retail customers through retail banking and asset management services. The bank offers personal, corporate, and internet banking services including accounts, deposits, credit cards, home loans, and personal loans.

The challenges

The client’s key issues related to the management of the firewalls, dealing with rule duplication and human errors. Their network security operations teams were hampered by manual, slow, and error-prone security change-management processes. It often took around four days to process a single change across their complex network environment. The frequent errors that arose from manual processes opened security gaps and put them at risk of cyberattacks.

Some of their challenges included:

• Human errors leading to misconfiguration – The organization was handling over 30 firewalls and 30 to 40 rules in a day across multiple firewalls. They lacked the skilled resources to implement these rule changes. This led to errors and misconfigurations.
• Lack of visibility – They lacked visibility into their overall network and traffic flows and failed to understand which rules applied to each firewall.
• Duplicate rules – They had many duplicate firewall policies, negatively impacting performance.
• Policy optimization – The organization required policies to be frequently optimized.
• Lack of visibility – The organization needed visibility across their networks, allowing them to quickly find and fix issues.
• Time-consuming manual change management processes.

Solution

The organization looked for a partner that understood their challenges, could integrate into their existing solutions, and could take full responsibility for any issues. In the words of the bank’s executive vice president, “We were looking for a partner, not a product.”

The key factors that the bank was looking for were:

• Alignment with their digital transformation vision – They wanted to align with key stakeholders among business, operations, network, and security teams.
• Automation as a key focus – Automation was important to reduce human errors, align with the considerable number of requests and adapt to the agile nature of critical applications. With automation, they were looking to implement firewall changes faster.
• Easy to use and integrate within the existing infrastructure.
• Unified view of their multi-vendor firewall estate – They wanted a single console where they could see all their firewalls, understand their collective risk, and gain a holistic view of the current state of their firewall policies.

As a result, the customer implemented the AlgoSec Security Management Solution.

Results:

The AlgoSec Security Management Solution transformed the bank’s digitalization journey, leading to:

• Time to implement rule changes decreased from 4-5 days to less than 48 hours – a 60% reduction.
• Automatically implemented changes – Changes are automatically implemented, without needing to guess which rules and devices are in path.
• Reduced human error and elimination of repetitive, manual tasks.
• Simplified daily operations.
• Automated change management across application-centric infrastructure.
• Identified and mitigated risks.
• Transformed digitization journey.

AlgoSec now has end-to-end visibility of which firewall it needs to implement the changes on. The bank was in the process of switching from a traditional infrastructure to Cisco ACI. The transition was smooth. AlgoSec seamlessly integrated into Cisco ACI and their existing Palo Alto Network devices. “I think we are the first in India who approached AlgoSec and got these solutions implemented – getting Cisco ACI, Palo Alto, and AlgoSec working hand in hand with full integration. This is the best thing we’ve seen till now,” noted the vice president.

Looking ahead, they plan to extend AlgoSec’s offering, mapping rule applications, and other capabilities to help them migrate to the cloud.