The Organization
This top 100 developing world bank has a strong deposit franchise, the second largest retail deposit base, a client-centric wholesale and retail franchise and a substantial and growing wealth management offering. The group offers a wide range of wholesale and retail banking and works in more than 550 locations.

The Challenge
Working with the bank – one of the largest financial institutions in South Africa – involved an extensive design implementation and deployment of its enterprise-wide security strategy and framework solutions. During implementation and deployment, Safend had to ensure that the organization was kept abreast of global threats and vulnerabilities. Focused on southern Africa, but with an aspiration to grow its business reach across the whole African continent, the bank is positioned as a bank for all – from both a retail and a wholesale banking perspective.

In 2009, the bank employed more than 22,000 people. Having multiple businesses in multiple countries, it was met with regulatory challenges. With the goal to be ready for the 2011 South African mandatory enforcement on regulations, including the 7th Principle, as well as comply with US and UK regulations, the bank needed to design, implement and deploy an enterprise-wide security strategy and framework solution.

The bank looked to products that could help organizations safeguard their intellectual property and customers’ critical data persistently – both inside and outside the company – and meet the new regulations. The challenges that the bank faced for endpoint threats in particular included: hardware key loggers, dual homing of endpoint (network bridging), port management and monitoring of USB, RW DVD, external hard drives and SD cards. Not only did their removable media (USB, VDC and external hard drives) lack encryption, but they also faced the threat of malicious code spreading via autorun. Finally, the biggest threat was information leakage at the endpoint.

The Solution
The bank chose Safend’s Data Protection Suite for their security needs – particularly for information leakage protection. Safend was able to provide key logger notification for the bank. It also prevented network bridging by blocking WiFi, Bluetooth, modems or IrDA. The Safend Data Protection Suite delivers a comprehensive solution that allows for complete visibility, control and protection of enterprise endpoints throughout the bank. Safend Data Protection Suite is intuitive to manage, almost impossible to circumvent, and guarantees connectivity and productivity, without sacrificing security or performance. Safend provides a comprehensive data protection solution in a single product, with a single management server and a single, lightweight agent.

The Results
By implementing the Safend Data Protection Suite, the bank was able to maintain secure files without the threat of a data breach. Safend solutions were rolled out to a total endpoint base of 30,000+ PCs across the South African bank. In the African subsidiaries, Safend is in the process of rolling out to an additional endpoint base of over 2,500 PCs.

This solution is easy-to-use and guarantees connectivity and productivity without sacrificing security or performance throughout the bank. The Suite that was deployed at the bank includes:

• Safend Encryptor – protects against data loss by providing PC and laptop hard disk encryption. Safend Encryptor is a hard-disk encryption solution that leverages the security of full-disk encryption and the flexibility of file-based encryption to protect sensitive data residing on PCs and laptops. The solution is completely transparent to end-users; it does not require them to activate the encryption/decryption process themselves, and all processes run in the background, without any interference with users’ ongoing work.
• Safend Protector – guards the confidential information from data breaches and targeted attacks. The solution provides granular control by logging, detecting and restricting data transfers by file type, device type or unique serial number, ensuring that data on each computer in the enterprise is protected 100% of the time, even when it is not connected to the network. Safend Protector can further ensure that mobile users and data are secure.

In Conclusion
The deployment of the Safend Data Protection Suite is not complex and it gives extensive controls for all users throughout the bank. The bank was able to customize the solutions for their internal policies and understand how to configure the system appropriately to achieve the best return on investment and comply with all regulations set forth by the South African mandatory enforcement. This software had a significant impact on the business process of the bank and allowed the bank to isolate and deal with rogue employees accessing data they were not authorized or not supposed to access, and disciplining them, while presenting accurate proof of the data breaches perpetrated by them.