Techcombank is one of the largest joint stock commercial banks in Vietnam. With more than 300 branches and 7,000 staff, Techcombank provides deposit products, loans, leasing, cash management and other services to more than 3.3 million individual customers and 45,000 corporate clients.
Tens of firewall devices and hundreds of routers and switches protect the financial data of Techcombank’s customers, as well as the operations of hundreds of branches throughout Vietnam.
As a bank, all security policies and firewall configurations must comply with PCI-DSS and ISO27001 standards. Ensuring compliance, however, created ongoing headaches for the IT security team.
“With equipment from many different vendors, even simple policy audits were challenging tasks,” says Mr. Van Anh Tuan, CSO of Techcombank. “As a result of the diversity of products and lack of visibility, it was difficult for us to monitor changes to rule configurations in real time in order to maintain internal security compliance as well as PCI compliance.”
“Cleaning up and fine tuning firewall policies was a particularly complex process, which made it difficult to respond quickly to the changing needs of our business applications,” adds Mr. Tuan. “We wanted a way to optimize and consolidate rules across all of our firewalls, regardless of manufacturer, and completely automate the end-to-end workflow for firewall rule change management.” In addition, Techcombank sought a solution that would simplify the process of conducting risk analysis, evaluating PCI compliance and identifying the necessary steps for remediation.
Following an in-depth competitive evaluation, Techcombank selected AlgoSec’s Security Management solution.
“AlgoSec met many of our key requirements, better than its competitors in our evaluation,” Mr. Tuan notes. Techcombank particularly liked AlgoSec’s superior security policy analysis and ability to make actionable recommendations with a high level of accuracy. “AlgoSec will enable us to identify ways to consolidate and optimize rules, perform deep risk analysis, automate workflows and ensure compliance in ways that other products cannot match,” says Mr. Tuan.
Techcombank’s IT team wants to be able to quickly identify security policy risks and see what specific steps they need to take for remediation. The bank uses AlgoSec to identify overly permissive firewall rules based on actual use as well as duplicate, unused and expired rules and objects. This information gives Techcombank the data they need to close off potential access points and help prevent attacks.
AlgoSec also provides clear, detailed recommendations on how to best reorder rules for optimal firewall performance. In addition, AlgoSec validates firewall policy and rules against regulations such as PCI, as well as industry best practices and customized corporate policies to uncover and prioritize risks and track trends over time.
For Mr. Tuan, one of the most valuable benefits of AlgoSec is the increased visibility into security policies across the full range of devices. “Now we can easily monitor our firewall operations and quickly detect any mistakes or non-compliant changes made. These operations used to be invisible to me.” Mr. Tuan comments.
The AlgoSec deployment process went very smoothly for Techcombank. “Our team received training from AlgoSec and their partners here in Vietnam and we were fully utilizing the product almost immediately. Post-implementation support has addressed every issue quickly and enabled us to take advantage of all aspects of the product in order to optimize our firewall rules and improve our security posture even faster than we anticipated,” Mr. Tuan adds.
Since implementation, AlgoSec has enabled Techcombank’s IT team to “greatly reduce our time and resources when complying with internal policies and PCI standards, and when monitoring changes in rules,” says Mr. Tuan. “We are very happy with the improved security and visibility provided by AlgoSec and will continue to use and exploit more AlgoSec features and add licenses,” he concluded.
