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Financial service organizations, such as FinTech startups, online payment platforms, or global banks have to modernize and transform their cloud strategy to meet the increasing demand for improved delivery of their financial services. However, this digital transformation can be new territory and may come with significant risk. Our client, a large multinational bank with a comprehensive portfolio of financial services and a global network of distributed workers, needed to modernize its cloud security strategy.
Being highly aware of the dangers of data breaches in the financial industry, the team wanted to be sure that critical data was not at risk for unauthorized access and/or exposure. Recognizing that any time a change of configuration occurs, gaps can develop and accumulate over time. They wanted to be sure that they had effective configuration drift detection, whether the change was a result of microservices, users, or even third-party applications.
As one of the responses to this growing threat, and worried that a misconfiguration could lead to unauthorized data exposure in their cloud, and that their manual audit processes wouldn’t catch issues in time, the team began looking for a solution to complement their growing cloud needs.
The Cloud Strategy Security Goals
As the financial institution began looking for a solution, they first outlined the goals that the right platform would help them achieve.
Identifying and Reducing Risk
An audit is integral to an organization’s security program and standard operating procedure for enterprise businesses.The bank needed a platform that could automatically detect all risk across their cloud infrastructure. The right solution would also give them advanced reporting capabilities and the ability to quickly uncover actionable insights.
The bank’s team wanted to eliminate all potential identity risks. Graphing all trust relationships between identities and their permissions were required to improve tracking, reporting, and monitoring of all identities. The team wanted to be able to track and manage these identities to prevent data access.
Increasing Security
To protect sensitive data, the bank needs to be able to discover and contionauly monitor data access. As such, the cloud security platform they wanted needed to be able to continuously scan data for security violations across all structured and unstructured data stores.
Maximizing Efficiency
This enterprise bank had rapidly growing workloads and needed efficiencies for resource allocation, streamlined collaboration, and coordination across multiple teams. Additionally, the team needed to manage the complexity of tens of thousands of identities and their data access rights in their cloud. Their goal was to simplify the views of their cloud and reduce complexity in managing drift.
Enforcing Compliance
As an international financial institution, regulatory compliance is a top priority. The bank operates across multiple regions — each of which has varying security and compliance requirements. To ensure compliance across all areas, the organization needed a platform that could enforce control policies across data and identities.
The organization’s leadership understood that continuous monitoring of their public cloud would enable teams to maintain an ongoing near-real-time awareness and assessment of their security risk and allow them to rapidly respond. Their mission was to integrate continuous auditing and improve the overall security framework of their cloud. This was a major decision that would have a direct impact on the company’s overall cloud security strategy and performance.
The Results
Sonrai Dig’s identity and data security platform was the perfect fit for solving the bank’s challenges.
Identity and access risks were easily identified and systematically removed leveraging Sonrai Dig. This financial enterprise required the ability to move from proof-of-concept to production quickly and without complexity. They leveraged the value in gaining comprehensive visibility into their groups, policies, identities, roles, accounts, permissions, and trust relationships across all of their cloud accounts. Dig integrated seamlessly with out-of-the-box identity risk frameworks and delivered the visibility within days of all “effective permissions” for data and identities and helped to remediate uncovered risks.
This bank wanted to address demands associated with controlling and managing privileged access and improve processes related to managing privileged identities. The team had a set of policies that were unique to their business and wanted to ensure these policies were put in place to restrict the creation or change of risky cloud services and eliminate the possibility of risks being created in the first place. Leveraging the flexibility of Sonrai Dig, the bank was able to build in their unique governance and security frameworks ensuring data stays secure and in their cloud. With Dig, this team can now see any unwanted changes that occur, actions that can be triggered to remediate the issue, and then eliminate risk.
This customer was able to gain complete visibility across their public clouds. Sonrai Dig enables the bank’s operations teams to own security while also providing a “big picture” view to security and audit teams, as well as corporate and executive management. Complete visibility helped them to reduce risk and reduce response times by resolving issues proactively. Dig’s continuous monitoring extended to third-party sources (such as Data Bricks and Hashicorp Vault), meaning the bank can identify possible data exposure risks based on secrets stored in these services.
This customer’s plan is to continue expanding and growing its cloud footprint while maintaining security and compliance across existing and new workloads.
Leading Financial Institutes Use Sonrai Dig
Sonrai Dig helps financial services clients innovate, modernize, and transform by removing the barriers to using cloud securely and allowing developers to focus on what truly matters for their businesses: innovation.
This digital transformation comes with significant concerns, like protecting personally identifiable information (PII) of customers. Government, industry, and corporate standards add even more compliance requirements. With these levels of scrutiny, data access and governance become a strategic element of their adoption of the cloud.
Leading financial services companies use Sonrai Dig to protect their public cloud environments from misconfiguration, policy violations, identity, and data governance challenges. With automated remediation, Sonrai Dig clients achieve continuous security and compliance and can fully realize the benefits of public cloud by migrating regulated workloads. Learn how Sonrai Dig can help your financial organization boost its cloud strategy.
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Sonrai cloud security platform, products and services are covered by U.S. Patent Nos. 10,728,307 and 11,134,085, together with other domestic and international patents pending. All rights reserved.