Last year was another big year for data breaches, and not in a good way. Gemalto’s breach level index is an online record of data breach incidents and reveals over 3.7 billion records have been lost since 2013.
Whilst “lost” data accounts for almost one quarter of all breaches, more than half (56%) are the result of malicious activity by an individual or group originating outside your organisation.
Financial data is a prime target for theft, with retail and financial institutions being hit hardest of all. High profile breaches targeting financial data at JP Morgan Chase, Home Depot, Target, Adobe, HSBC, Carphone Warehouse and others have hit the headlines over the past couple of years.
Financial Services is one of the most tightly regulated business sectors. The FCA, the Data Protection Act, PCI/DSS and Euro SOX all have implications for securing financial data in transit.
A financial institution’s responsibility to data security doesn’t end at the front door; it extends beyond the borders of the business when shared with a third party. No matter how secure your internal policies and practices, once your data is traversing the public network, it’s vulnerable.
Privacy and security become even more complex when data traverses not just organisations, but territorial boundaries. Data protection rules differ from country to country and strict rules apply to ensure the security and integrity of financial transactions in a global, digital economy.
The sensitive nature of the data held at rest and transmitted across their networks places an emphasis on IT security. However, the time-sensitive nature of transactional data means that any stringent data security policies, procedures or technologies cannot come with an additional network overhead. When dealing with large scale transactions, every nanosecond counts.
These exacting standards require high-performance, low-latency solutions to ensure security, availability and profitability.
High-Performance, Low-Latency Solutions
Senetas has a legacy of designing and developing solutions tailored to the specific requirements of the global banking and financial services industry. Our state-of-the-art ‘high-assurance’ encryption solutions allow organisations to remotely provision and manage global WAN security as easily as they would their LAN or data centre connections.
Our solutions are amongst the most rigorously tested and certified in the world, meeting the internationally recognised standards of FIPS, Common Criteria, CAPS and NATO; ensuring both physical security and best-practice encryption key management.
Provisioning and management of encryption devices, either locally or remotely, is quick and easy. Set and forget functionality means minimal ongoing maintenance and advanced monitoring tools allow for real-time alerts or reporting for audits, compliance and forensics.
Financial Services Expertise
We work with banking clients and financial institutions on a global scale; securing everything from SAN connections to data recovery centres, campus networks for real time trading and transactional data exchange to core banking applications and video conferencing over wide area networks.
Securing Global Wan for Real-Time Banking Applications
Our client is an international bank with a network of branches across three continents. Evolving business requirements and the rise of big data meant they needed to upgrade their encryption infrastructure.
The incumbent encryption solution was not able to cope with the changing demands of regulatory compliance and the emergence of performance-sapping, real-time banking applications. What was needed was a high-throughput, low latency solution that was easy to deploy and manage.
Gemalto’s SafeNet CN8000 high-speed, Layer 2 encryption solutions (designed and manufactured by Senetas) are certified to the highest commercial standards and delivered outstanding performance across the MPLS network, with latency tested below 15 microseconds – crucial for real-time communications and banking applications.
1Gbps encryptors were rate-limited to 100Mbps to meet capex budget requirements whilst providing built-in scalability. The future-proof installation allows the client to upgrade to higher bandwidths without swapping out the existing hardware.
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