Leading life insurance company ensures security and compliance

A leading insurance provider of life, disability and other benefits for individuals increases efficiency and ensures continuous compliance on their networks.

Background

This life insurance company provides insurance and wealth-management products and services to millions of Americans.

The company employs thousands of people and maintains a network of several thousand financial representatives. They offer a wide range of insurance products and services that include life insurance, disability income insurance, annuities, investments, dental and vision.

Challenges

For decades, the company operated a large and growing data center in Bethlehem, PA which they recently transferred to Dallas, TX. During and since the transfer, the company has been replacing much of its multi-vendor network infrastructure, consolidating on Cisco Firepower technology, but still maintaining vestiges of other routers, firewalls and network equipment.

At the new data center, the company’s IT staff maintains more than 100 firewalls that host some 10,000 rules.

The company’s network security engineer described the considerable pressure on the security staff: “Change requests are frequent, 25-30 per week, demanding considerable time and effort by the security team.”

Due to the presence of firewalls from multiple vendors, change requests were analyzed manually and pushed to devices with great care so as not to interrupt the operation of a rapidly growing body of applications.

“The change–request process was tedious and very time consuming,” declared the engineer. “as was the pressure to maintain a strong compliance posture at all times.”

The company is subject to a litany of demanding insurance-industry regulations that concern the care of personal information and processes. Managing risk is critical to the success of the business and being able to ascertain compliance with regulations is always vital.

Solution

The security team turned to AlgoSec to help them manage network security policy across the large data center that includes firewalls from multiple vendors. After a careful review, the security team acquired AlgoSec’s Horizon Security Analyzer to speed up the process of firewall change management as well as to continuously quantify the degree of compliance and level of risk.

Vendor-agnostic AlgoSec Horizon Security Analyzer delivers visibility and analysis of complex network security policies across on–premise and cloud networks. It automates and simplifies security operations including troubleshooting, auditing and risk analysis. Horizon Security Analyzer optimizes the configuration of firewalls, routers, web proxies and related network infrastructure to ensure security and compliance.

Results

After a very short installation and learning period, the security staff became proficient at operating Horizon Security Analyzer helpful capabilities. Soon thereafter, staff members undertook AlgoSec certification courses to become experts in using the solution for firewall analysis.

“AlgoSec worked right out of the box,” said the engineer. “We got started quickly and never looked back.”

The AlgoSec solution has significantly improved processes, delivering significantly improved results for their security team:

• Reduced time to analyze and optimize firewall rules, automatically checking for shadow rules and discovering other rules eligible for consolidation or deletion.
• Continual optimization of firewall rules across their entire network estate.
• Increased efficiency of security staff, enabling them to keep up with the volume of change requests.
• Accelerated and more accurate change verification.
• Audit-readiness, generating scheduled and on-demand compliance reports.

The security staff looks forward to implementing AlgoSec Horizon FireFlow (AFF), that will enable them to push changes automatically to their population of firewalls, eliminating errors and further reducing risk. With AFF, the staff will be able to respond to changing business requirements with increased speed and agility.

They added: “We are also checking out AlgoSec’s new cloud-security solution since we are migrating a growing number of applications to AWS.”