The Enterprise – Altech Card Solutions (ACS)
ACS is a division of Altech. A member of the Altron group, Altech is highly active in the telecommunications, multimedia and IT industries.
ACS has a number of sub divisions that supply product and service in a wide variety of e-Commerce. They are:
• Gemalto Point of Sales terminals and software generation
• e-Security sub division that represents Thales, nCipher, VeriSign, Cisco, Checkpoint, Fortinet, Juniper product sets and solutions. eiQ SecureVue forms the centre of the Security Operation Centre service platform, from both a services as well as product provision point of view.
• Integrated Transaction Services which provides financial transaction switching services to the merchant and banking community
THE CHALLENGE
Banks and other financial institutions rely on ACS e-Security to provide a full range of security solutions that satisfy industry rules and regulations including the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). The growth of ACS e-Security business throughout Africa required the company’s engineers to spend increasing amounts of time producing and evaluating reports for various security devices such as firewalls and intrusion protection devices. “Engineers waited hours for the data to be extracted from our previous SIEM solutions” said Marson “which they had to analyze with Excel spreadsheets in order to produce management level reports and graphs”.
Expanding customer needs, as well as principles based on cost effectiveness, led ACS e-Security to seek a better, more cost-effective security monitoring and compliance solution.
THE SOLUTION
ACS E-SECURITY replaced its existing SIEM system with eIQnetworks’ SecureVue as the foundation for its security and compliance management services. Now ACS E-SECURITY engineers gain the benefit of automated correlations of all log data plus performance, vulnerability, configuration, asset and flow data from the full spectrum of their customers’ network assets, including Windows systems. With everything stored in a single database and the ability to generate pre-formatted reports, engineers can rapidly interpret the data to provide more proactive customer service. Full correlation across all device types and data types provided by SecureVue allows ACS E-SECURITY to provide a more advanced view into corporate IT posture than any other solution that was evaluated at the time that SecureVue was selected.
Using unique compression techniques, ACS e-Security’s SecureVue implementation requires a fraction of the disk space to store customer data compared to their previous system and requires up to 15 times less bandwidth than the previous SIEM solution, which is ultimately very valuable in sub-Saharan Africa. ACS e-Security’s technical team is able to tailor SecureVue for their specific needs without costly external support.
THE END RESULT
ACS e-Security delivers more in-depth security for their customers’ card transactions by equipping their engineers with tools that display potential problems and vulnerabilities in real-time. “With graphs and information presented in readable formats, engineers get into the nitty-gritty with customers, letting them know right away, ‘You have an issue on your IDS,’ or whatever the problem is,” Marson said. “We can devote our time to formulating recommendations that truly up-level our customers’ security posture.”
Marson said SecureVue’s reporting features dramatically speed up the reporting process by delivering finished reports with graphics that were previously created by hand. “Time taken to produce client reports is greatly reduced with SecureVue.” Marson said. “From all perspectives, SecureVue provides significant cost savings and additional value to our customer offering.”
With compliance monitoring and reporting well-in-hand, ACS E-SECURITY is now using SecureVue to offer additional services to its customers. The product’s ability to collect, encrypt and send Windows system data combined with its real-time reporting capabilities now enables ACS E-SECURITY to deliver more proactive helpdesk support, such as assisting end-users when they are locked out of their workstations. Marson said SecureVue’s capabilities for correlating configuration data also opens new opportunities for ACS E-SECURITY to sell configuration management services to its customers.
ACS E-SECURITY sees additional business opportunities based on SecureVue reporting such as performing vulnerability assessments and a variety of audits. We are very satisfied with SecureVue from eIQnetworks,” Marson concludes. “It saves time, reduces costs, improves service, increases sales, and opens new revenue opportunities.
|
