In the UK, Standard Chartered Bank has deployed Enterasys Networks’ Dragon Intrusion Defense product to guarantee availability of financial services.
Dragon protects SCB’s network infrastructure and ensures compliance with directives such as the Basel-II risk-management accord, according to the bank.
SCB needed to ensure that the 34,000 PCs/desktops and 5,000 servers used by its more than 30,000 employees in 50 countries were protected from large-scale computer worms and viruses, besides potential internal and external threats affecting the bank’s ability to comply with new regulatory directives. In short, SCB required a method of monitoring abnormal computer traffic.
What they say
"We chose to adopt Dragon as it suits SCB to have a managed monitoring approach which relies more on human intervention, rather than trusting an IPS to make automated decisions to reconfigure the network to prevent attacks," said John Meakin, group head of information security for SCB. After evaluating its existing intrusion-detection systems and those from several other vendors, SCB chose Dragon to protect all of the bank’s primary Internet gateways. For each gateway, SCB adopted a multi-layered structure, with Dragon systems deployed on either side of the existing firewalls to provide strength and depth in filtering out inappropriate traffic before it reached the internal network. To ensure continuity of service and security for e-banking customers, redundant gateways are protected with their own Dragon systems.
"We’re delighted with the results so far because security of private financial data is at the very heart of our commitment to customer service. Following the success of this implementation, we plan to expand deployment of Enterasys Secure Networks solutions to other areas of the network," Meakin said. Enterasys reports that its product discovers threats, network misuse, system exploits and other malicious IT activities that can disrupt business.
"SCB is clearly committed to offering its worldwide customer base the highest levels of information assurance and availability, enabling them to conduct business without interruption," Cynthia Gallant, executive vice president of Secure Networks for Enterasys. "In a time when security and regulatory compliance can quickly consume IT resources, Enterasys’ unique differentiation is our ability to help financial services institutions – and all our other enterprise customers – protect vital data from internal and external threats with a minimum of cost and resources, enabling them to focus on providing customers with the highest levels of service."
