Leading FinTech Provider Reduces Security Risks With AlgoSec

FinTech company gains a holistic view of hybrid network, enhances compliance posture.

BACKGROUND

The company has thousands of employees and annual revenue over a billion euros. The company manages 168,750 banking workstations, over 82.2 million customer accounts and ensures nationwide smooth cash supply with its 34,000 ATMs and self-service terminals.

THE CHALLENGE

The company relies on over 170 firewalls from Check Point Software, Juniper, and Cisco. They also have over 48,000 virtual servers, and security controls including proxies, security gateways, DDoS protection, and intrusion protection systems (IPS) from vendors including Check Point, Juniper, Cisco, and F5. Their networks process approximately 3.17 petabytes daily.

Some of the challenges included:

• Difficulty maintaining internal toolset.
• High maintenance costs for their internal tools.
• Lack of visibility into their network.

THE SOLUTION

The company was searching for a solution that provided:

• Automation for their entire network, including software-defined networks.
• Visibility of the required communications of the business applications.
• Review and approval of traffic flows.
• Ability to apply a predefined set of firewall rules to newly deployed virtual machines.

Following an in-depth evaluation, the company selected AlgoSec’s security policy management solution.

“The main reason we chose AlgoSec was extensive support for multiple firewall vendors,” said their IT systems engineer. “We have a multi-vendor strategy, and AlgoSec fully supports all of the vendors that we are using.”

For over a decade, they have been using AlgoSec’s Security Policy Management Solution, which includes AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer and AlgoSec FireFlow. After several years of relying just on Firewall Analyzer and FireFlow, they also added AlgoSec AppViz and AppChange (formerly AlgoSec BusinessFlow) to their toolkit.

AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer ensures security and compliance by providing visibility and analysis into complex network security policies.

AlgoSec FireFlow improves security and saves security staffs’ time by automating the entire security policy change process, eliminating manual errors, and reducing risk.

AlgoSec AppViz provides critical security information regarding the firewalls and firewall rules supporting each connectivity flow by letting users discover, identify, and map business applications.

AlgoSec AppChange empowers customers to make changes at the business application level, including application migrations, server deployment, and decommissioning projects. “AppViz and AppChange provide a more application-centric viewpoint. It’s really helpful for communication within our business departments,” said their IT engineer.

THE RESULTS

By using the AlgoSec Security Management solution, the company was able to automate their network policy change management processes, enhance their compliance posture, accelerate hardware migrations, and gain deep visibility into their hybrid network.

Some of the benefits gained include:

• Deep integration and visibility into their hybrid network.
• Faster firewall migrations and deployments of virtual firewalls.
• Eliminated unnecessary policy changes and reduced the time required to process policy changes.
• Ability to review and approve communication flows (a PCI DSS requirement).
• Automatic assessment and reporting for regulations including PCI DSS and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX).

“The network map is one of the keys in AlgoSec,” said their network engineer.

“The greatest benefit we had from AlgoSec is the integration into the network and holistic view of how our entire network operated,” added the network engineer. “AlgoSec really fits into our environment. You can customize AlgoSec to fit into your business processes and workflows,” noted the engineer. “We have a long partnership with AlgoSec and really appreciate working together and the great support we receive.”