Leading Latin American Stock Exchange Maintains a Secure, Compliant Trading Environment
• Recouped investment in AlgoSec within the first year
• Reduce rule review project from 1 month to 1 day
• Helps maintain a secure, compliant environment
• Frees up staff to focus on other crucial security tasks
Headquartered in Sao Paulo, Brazil, BM&FBOVESPA is the largest stock exchange in Latin America. BM&FBOVESPA has a diversified and integrated trading model offering a complete custody system. Trading takes place in an exclusively electronic environment. The Exchange enables customers to trade equities, to hedge and to execute arbitrage, investment diversification, allocation and the leveraging of positions.
To keep its systems and transactions secure, BM&FBOVESPA utilizes firewalls from several vendors. In total these firewalls have about 40,000 firewall rules, with another 5,000 added annually. Even with two full-time employees
focused on maintaining firewall rules, the steady addition of rules and objects created clutter and consumed the firewall appliances’ CPU and memory.
Therefore, BM&FBOVESPA realized that an automated solution for firewall policy management was the natural next step in the maturity of its information security processes. “Manually managing our firewall policies was difficult
and time consuming. We needed a solution that supported a variety of different firewall vendors and could integrate and manage all policies in an automated manner,” said Wellington Vita, Information Security Manager of BM&FBOVESPA.
Following a recommendation from Compugraf, one of BM&FBOVESPA’s key security partners, Vita and his team evaluated AlgoSec’s Security Management solution. The proof of concept clearly showed the value of the solution and the ease and speed with which it could be deployed. The ability to integrate and manage devices from multiple vendors and provide visibility across the entire network was also important in BM&FBOVESPA’s decision to select AlgoSec.
BM&FBOVESPA uses AlgoSec on a daily basis to manage its firewall policies. “AlgoSec is a great product which helps us maintain the core of our environment -the firewall policy. With AlgoSec we can easily identify unused rules and objects, as well as rules that were not compliant with our information security policy.” noted Vita. “While using AlgoSec, we also discovered a new benefit. AlgoSec enables our information security architects to understand how information flows between firewalls, which helps them significantly with their information security projects.”
The gains in efficiency and productivity have dramatically reduced the time consumed by firewall policy management. “Because of operational efficiencies AlgoSec paid for itself in the first year,” said Vita.
In addition to cutting the time needed to perform ongoing policy management, the solution enabled BM&FBOVESPA to meet deadlines that would previously have been unachievable. “A month ago, we had to review our incoming internet access rules in two days — and did. Without AlgoSec, it would have taken us at least a month to accomplish this task,” added Vita.
“AlgoSec helps us maintain a problem-free environment. And we have been able to move members of our team who previously handled these maintenance jobs onto other tasks, so we can do more with less. I recommend AlgoSec to other companies — it will help them improve their firewall policy management processes,” concluded Vita.
