Leading International Financial Group

Providing secure network access for staff and customers; utilising RSA and FireEye Technologies

“We are working with security infrastructure so we cannot afford to take any risks, we like the assurance that we have BlueFort experts doing all the heavy lifting.”

EMEA IT Director, An International Financial Group

Key challenges
  • Fast moving cyber security landscape
  • Wide number of products in the technology stack
  • Very low margin for error when working on security infrastructure
  • Emphasis on getting best value out of existing investments
Taking no risks

BlueFort works closely with the EMEA IT Team at one of the top 5 largest international financial groups. Supporting on their security infrastructure, strategy and support to ensure they can provide secure networks for their staff and customer base.

Commenting on the value BlueFort offer to them, their EMEA IT Director described; "We have a large number of security products and we certainly could not have a dedicated SME for each. We prefer that for security projects the analysis, planning, installation, configuration and documentation is handled by BlueFort.

We potentially do have the resource in-house, but BlueFort are specialists in security solutions and are carrying out similar projects in many other companies so they have a much deeper level of knowledge and experience in the process, products and best practice. We are working with security infrastructure products that are essential to our network so we cannot afford to take any risks, we like the assurance that we have BlueFort experts doing all the heavy lifting for that project.”

Streamlined Convenient Authentication

BlueFort has partnered with this financial group for many years, most recently extending the rollout of RSA MFA tokens and an upgrade to their FireEye hardware. Driven by a BYOD project to extend remote access to all staff, the RSA upgrade has provided a more streamlined and convenient authentication method for their end users while ensuring their high levels of security are maintained.

The FireEye upgrade has improved visibility by enabling SSL termination and inspection to ensure there are no blind spots to FireEye’s ability to detect rogue activity. Both projects were handled by the BlueFort Professional Services team who are some of the most accredited engineers in the UK.

The EMEA IT Director explained; “BlueFort has been very heavily involved with migrations and upgrades in the last year or so. I have found that if we do have any issues, we just call BlueFort once and we can get it resolved straight away. They are very professional and flexible, I cannot fault BlueFort’s customer service.”

Leveraging BlueFort’s vendor partnerships

BlueFort’s emphasis on a select group of complimentary vendor partnerships means they can focus on those relationships and technologies and be recognised as experts in those technologies. BlueFort will regularly provide the financial group with vendor agnostic advice in their approach to a new upgrade or solution. BlueFort’s vendor partnerships can be leveraged by the financial group to provide the IT team with insights into new feature releases and understanding of product roadmaps so they can plan the strategic evolution of their security infrastructure accordingly.

Optimising security investments

To optimise their security investments this financial group will typically do a full review of their technology every 6 months, analysing if there are any new or prominent threats to consider and if there are any new features in their existing technology stack that they would benefit from that can be unlocked. The financial group also has a Global Cyber Security Team who regularly recommend a highly-vetted shortlist of strategic tools from which the EMEA IT Director will consider implementation. These recommended tools are best of breed for both security and value and there’s a great synergy with BlueFort’s strategic partnerships.

Their Director explained; “When we are planning to do an upgrade, we generally speak to BlueFort in advance to leverage their experience to help us plan. We work with BlueFort in terms of shaping security infrastructure projects because they can provide insights and best practice expertise based on what we are trying to achieve. BlueFort will provide professional services engineers to help throughout the project – we can’t have SMEs for everything and with the speed that the security landscape changes it’s better for us to lean on the experts whenever a specialist skillset is required.”