Financial client : network security
Financial Client
Our client is a banking organization. The company provides a range of banking and financial services. This includes consumer, business and institutional banking and wealth management services. The company attends to approximately 14 million customers through over 1000 branches and nearly 3000 ATMs.
Objective
We were initially engaged to assist with the backlog of day-to-day network functions relating to the delivery of business-critical applications. Our engineers were required to seamlessly integrate with existing internal teams and business processes to deliver capabilities quickly. The initial engagement evolved quickly, allowing BestPath to lead a network security appliance deployment and migration.
Engagement
Network teams often have many concurrent projects and activities underway at any one time. Some of the projects may be strategic and other activities may be operational such as service improvement functions. BestPath welcomed the opportunity to help with operational tasks and service improvement projects to free up their core network team to focus on strategic business deliverables.
The initial tranche of the engagement required our engineers to liaise with application owners to validate their requirements. Following the validation, our engineers implemented all requests to ensure that application components could function as per their design.
Templating and automating the configuration sped up the process and allowed us to complete the work ahead of schedule. Once this was complete, the next stage was to deploy new firewall infrastructure and migrate all security services from the legacy hardware to the new solution.
The new solution had the following requirements:
Simpler, easier to manage policies.
Simplified zoning
Enhanced logging
Increased bandwidth capabilities
Fully resilient
The migration had the additional requirement of completing the work with minimal downtime due to crucial banking applications hosted on the infrastructure.
Migrating firewall policy between platforms can be difficult. BestPath created custom tooling to ingest legacy firewall policy and translate the ruleset to an updated policy that our engineers could deploy to the new platform.
Benefits
This engagement had many benefits to the client:
- Freed up permanent members of staff to focus on strategic business deliverables
- Expand the network team account for a peak in network delivery requirements
- Implement operational tasks rapidly to deliver projects on time.
- Our engineers integrated quickly into the existing internal team and business processes
Creating the tooling to automate the policy translation had many benefits to the client.
- Reduced project delivery times
- Ensured consistency with the configuration; e.g., naming standards
- Prevented the likelihood of human error within the configuration
- Ensured that the migration could proceed with confidence
