Business decisions and information technology environments within financial services institutions are being heavily influenced today by a related set of objectives. Banks, brokerage firms, and insurance companies alike are intent on enhancing customer experience, ensuring customer confidence and trust, improving productivity, and protecting private and sensitive information. In an industry where many of the products are commodities, these goals are key ingredients essential to providing and maintaining a measure of differentiation and customer loyalty.
Financial services IT professionals are turning to the Sourcefire 3D® System and Enterprise Threat Management (ETM) to:
- Protect critical infrastructure and sensitive data. Banking and financial market networks are widely deemed to be “critical infrastructure.” In many instances, the transactions being processed represent not only the life savings of individuals, but also the lifeblood of the global economy. As such, the level of criticality and sensitivity of computing functions being conducted on financial networks often exceeds that associated with the networks of typical commercial organizations. From an information security perspective, this should translate into a higher standard of due care.
- Comply with a multitude of regulatory requirements. Network security requirements from the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), Basel II, and other sources have emerged and will drive compliance enforcement in the financial services community.
- Secure legacy systems. Many financial institutions continue to operate significant amounts of legacy computing infrastructure, including numerous mainframe-based applications. These systems are often fully interconnected with systems that are more modern and continue to perform mission-critical functions. However, many of these older systems are exposed to network-borne threats, and these institutions cannot afford to remove them from service for remediation.
- Keep pace with the explosive growth in network traffic. Financial market firms must deal with skyrocketing trading volumes and the resulting availability, capacity, and performance requirements of associated networks and systems.