Case Study
Financial Services
One of the World’s
Leading Global Human
Capital and Management
Consulting Firms Secures
Data across Europe
with Vormetric
“The Vormetric
solution enables us to
take appropriate steps
to minimise the risk of
data theft, damage, or
loss and maintain our
client service
excellence.”
Case Study Customer: A leading global human capital and
management consultancy handling more than 70 million
customer interactions every year across multiple geographic
regions throughout Europe.
Business Challenge
A core part of the consultancy’s operations revolve around the collection and
careful management of individually identifiable human resource records. Given
the huge volume of sensitive data that its operations hold and manage across
interconnected networks, strict privacy control and access policy are a necessity
for the company.
In light of plans to consolidate aspects of its Pan-European operations, it became
a priority to implement a data protection solution which could address various
data privacy compliance concerns in the EU and worldwide. Due to the sensitivity of the data involved, it is essential that the company be able to demonstrate
to its customers that their data could not be accessed indiscriminately, and that
customer data could not be copied, duplicated or transferred across international
borders in contravention of local legislation stemming from the EU Data Protection Directive.
Evolving European Union (EU) data protection regulations – including the UK Data
Protection Act – require that the firm must be able to continually demonstrate to
customers that it is compliant with the latest industry and governmental requirements. In addition, the new USA PATRIOT Act presented a serious business
challenge for the company as customers in Europe required clear and auditable
processes be put in place to ensure that only certain staff can access certain
types of data, as well as that specific data cannot be transferred or duplicated
across international borders.
Robust encryption with monitored key management was determined the best way
to overcome not only the risk posed by increasingly prevalent cyber attacks, but
to also meet stringent regulatory compliance demands and issues surrounding
‘data sovereignty’ in a consolidated virtual environment.
Chief Architect
Case Study
Financial Services
Technical Challenge
Despite having existing data security solutions in place to protect sensitive
customer data, the company found itself in a position whereby it needed a
more powerful and simple way to manage security across a variety of systems
and locations. The Vormetric Data Security solution addressed the security
and access policies required to manage and secure the data of its growing
customer base.
A spokesperson for the company said, “We’re under a lot of pressure to
demonstrate separation of duties to our end users, many of which being large
banks and other international financial institutions. As a result, we must have
security provisions in place that allow us to report precisely on where data is
stored, where it can be accessed from and who can access it.”
Solution
Global Human Resources
and Management Consultancy
Secures Data across Europe
with Vormetric
Given that the company’s customer interactions are highly transactional by
their very nature, encryption performance and the impact on the speed and
reliability of systems, was of utmost concern. The company has no option but
to implement strict security measures, but at the same time could not tolerate
any significant impact on application performance.
Business Need:
• Security and access control for
sensitive data flowing across
EU borders
Prior to going into production with the solution, the Vormetric solution was
deployed in ‘learn mode’, enabling the implementation of polices in a draft
form without explicitly enforcing them. This low-risk approach, initially applied
to a disaster recovery environment, enabled the company to test and review
policies before applying them to the production environment. After this highly
successful proof of concept trial, the Vormetric Data Security solution was
applied to a heterogeneous database environment.
Technology Need:
• Implement comprehensive encryption
and access control solution with
nominal operational
or performance impact
Results
Implementation of the solution took just one month and was deployed during
scheduled database maintenance, minimizing the risk of downtime or the
violation of any client agreements.
Vormetric Encryption agents reside on the company’s servers and evaluate all
information requests against customisable policies, providing intelligent and
seamless security and access control over sensitive data. Following implementation, a spokesperson for the company commented that, “There had been
extremely minimal impact on operations and no material degradation in
performance” – demonstrating how the product’s design is such that it
mitigates impact on database and application performance.
Solution Result:
• Vormetric Encryption implemented
across diverse environment
for structured and unstructured data
Result:
• Vormetric Data Security facilitated
compliance with UK Data
Protection Act and the EU Data
Protection Directive
He continued, “We needed a data protection strategy that not only secured
our data stores effectively but also allowed us to implement a policy to monitor
data movement – identifying who accessed what and where. The Vormetric
solution allows us to simplify separation of duties and, with initial roll-out taking just one month, disruption and administration-overhead has been minimal.”
Vormetric Data Security
The Vormetric Data Security product family provides a single, manageable and
scalable solution to manage any key and encrypt any file, any database, any
application, anywhere it resides — without sacrificing application performance
and avoiding key management complexity.
About Vormetric
Vormetric is the leader in enterprise encryption and key management for
physical, virtual and cloud environments. For more information, please visit
www.vormetric.com.
Copyright © 2012 Vormetric, Inc. All rights reserved. Vormetric is a registered trademark of Vormetric, Inc. All other
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Vormetric, Inc.
2545 N.1st Street, San Jose, CA 95131
888.267.3727
408.433.6000
[email protected]
www.vormetric.com