Background: Securing a Vast Global Financial Network
This customer, a large financial services company, operates more than 1,000 branch locations across the United States, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Europe, managing 250 networks in 24 countries. As expected in such a highly-distributed enterprise, the firm leverages a broad array of endpoint devices—from desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones to point-of-sale systems and ATMs—to support its global operations.
Navigating Global Compliance and Distributed Security Challenges
Maintaining effective cybersecurity in such a large, geographically dispersed IT environment is inherently complex and challenging. This complexity is further amplified by the stringent regulatory context of international banking and financial services. The banking institution faced several critical challenges:
- Global Policy Enforcement: Deploying and consistently maintaining uniform and comprehensive IT security policies across all global branches in a timely and reliable fashion.
- Audit Mandates: Ensuring full regulatory compliance, which depended on successfully passing ongoing formal security audits conducted by outside organizations.
- Common Criteria Compliance: The chosen system needed to meet the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation framework (ISO/IEC 15408).
- Security Triad Assurance: Guaranteeing the consistent and reliable maintenance of systems and data confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
- Scalability & Reliability: Assuring the solution’s scalability and consistent reliability across a vast, geographically distributed network architecture.
- Endpoint Visibility: Achieving comprehensive visibility for all network-connected devices (wired and wireless).
- Policy Management Complexity: The need for flexible, efficient IT security policy creation and enforcement without high management barriers for existing sys admin staff.
- Audit Logging: Requiring comprehensive security and compliance audit logging.
Solution: Genians NAC – A Unified Approach to Global Security
Genians provided the bank with a comprehensive Network Access Control (NAC) solution, specifically designed to effectively manage IT security policies and compliance across their extensive global footprint. The Genians NAC solution delivered:
- 360º Global Visibility: Offering a complete “bird’s-eye view” of all endpoint devices across all global branches in real-time, eliminating network blind spots.
- Consolidated Authentication & Role-Based Access: Simplifying the complexity of managing critical user/device authentication by consolidating multiple authentication methods (including single-sign-on) and providing granular role-based access control based on device type, user, job title, and department.
- Automated IP Address Management: Presenting a fully-automated, on-demand IP address request system and providing IP address name translation management, with mapping of static IPs to dedicated devices, users, and their comprehensive profile information.
- Integrated Endpoint Security: Seamlessly integrating with the firm’s existing endpoint security solutions and ensuring the installation of required software versioning.
- Streamlined Onboarding: Providing an efficient and intuitive onboarding process for new users via a self-service portal.
- Reduced Administrative Burden: Significantly lowering the overall administrative and monitoring workload for IT security staff.
Genians’ non-disruptive sensing technology was crucial, enabling the bank to see the “what/who/when/where” of all network connections in real-time. This allowed for precise and comprehensive management of the entire marketplace of potential endpoint devices, simplifying the complexity of critical user/device authentication through seamless integration with existing systems.
Summary: Global Compliance, Optimal Security, and Streamlined Operations
By employing Genian NAC, this global banking institution gained comprehensive network surveillance, allowing it to effectively manage its vast IT network infrastructure across 24 countries. This ensures the highest levels of system security, availability, and regulatory compliance.
Achieving Regulatory Excellence and Operational Efficiency
The bank can now derive actionable intelligence from its network, enhancing the profiling of all devices and users for granular policy management and dynamic access control. Genians NAC simplifies the complexity of managing critical user/device authentication and achieves full integration with existing systems, providing a centralized and intuitive management interface. This ultimately allows the bank to maintain strict compliance with international financial regulations, reduce operational costs, and streamline IT security workflows across its expansive global operations.
