English | Login | Support | Blog Free Evaluation Products & Solutions Partners Services Resources Company Home Company Customers Case Studies Case Study Discovery Case Study Leading South African Financial Services Organisation Streamlines Firewall Audits and Simplifies the Change Workflow | Discovery Discovery SA's IT Security team improves responsiveness to its business units, gains confidence in its international regulatory compliance, and preserves security infrastructure. Business Impact Reduced time spent preparing for regulatory audits from weeks to seconds! Increased responsiveness to firewall change requests Extended life of hardware assets by reducing the size of the firewall rulesets Reduced risk by eliminating unnecessary rules and gaining visibility into the change process "For one firewall, we were able to remove 30,000 rules. Now we can use those assets more optimally. A firewall with 500,000 rules isn't going to cope as well as one with 100,000 rules. By optimising our devices, AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer saves us money in the long term." Marc Silver, Security Manager, Discovery SA Background Discovery, a publicly traded South African financial services company operating in four continents, serves nearly five million clients in South Africa, the UK, the US and China. The company's products include health assurance, life insurance, short-term insurance, long-term savings and investments and wellness benefits. Discovery's network is secured with 13 firewall pairs from multiple vendors, and is continually growing. Operating in the highly regulated insurance and health sectors, Discovery monitors its compliance with international privacy laws and security criteria, including PCI-DSS globally; Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA in the US; the Data Protection Act in the UK; and South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act. Challenge Following its unbundling from FirstRand in 2007, Discovery grew rapidly, even during a world-wide recession that toppled many competitors. Through its early years, the company managed firewalls through an internally developed, legacy system which offered very limited visibility into the change request process. "We grew faster than anyone expected," says Marc Silver, Security Manager. "Two years ago, we had no way to track what changes had been made at all. We then implemented an Excel spreadsheet method to manage change requests, but we needed better visibility into what changes were requested to which firewall, for what business need "”and also to make sure proper risk analysis was getting done." Discovery's growth necessitated a rapid increase in the number of firewalls deployed, and the corresponding ruleset sizes. The time required to audit them burgeoned, ultimately taking up to three weeks per firewall. The IT Security team of four engineers recognised that it needed a fresh approach to manage risk and ensure compliance. Solution Discovery chose the AlgoSec Security Management Suite, comprising AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer and AlgoSec FireFlow, to deliver automated, comprehensive firewall operations, risk analysis and change management. Marc states that compared to AlgoSec's competitors, "AlgoSec has more tightly integrated change control, and is easier to manage... Another big advantage is that we can find unused rules and look at rule consolidation in an easily exportable format that we can manipulate," says Silver. AlgoSec FireFlow's integration with Request Tracker (RT) change management system was also important in Discovery's selection of a security management system. "We use RT for our internal ticketing system, and the stability of AlgoSec's integration with RT met our requirements. AlgoSec's visual workflow in FireFlow is clear and easy to understand"”more mature than the others we evaluated," adds Silver. Previously, the Discovery security team lacked efficient resources to determine how to best optimise rules and identify those that were unnecessary. "Since we've had AlgoSec, we've removed thousands of rules. At the same time, we haven't lost any agility in terms of making changes the business units want," notes Silver. Results Since implementing AlgoSec Security Management Suite, Discovery has found its security audits running more effectively. Discovery relies on AlgoSec's built-in compliance reports to address Sarbanes-Oxley,HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and other national and international regulatory requirements. "Every year internal audit would take our entire rulesets for each firewall pair and tell us where we needed to make improvements. AlgoSec allows us to now submit an automated report to our auditing team. It tells us what our security state is, and what needs to be remediated. The total process used to take three months. Now we can get in a click of a button what took two to three weeks per firewall to produce manually," says Silver. Discovery has also found an unexpected advantage to the new system: "AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer tells us what rules are in use and what rules are not. For one firewall, we were able to remove 30,000 rules. Now we can use those assets more optimally. A firewall with 500,000 rules isn't going to cope as well as one with 100,000 rules. By optimising our devices, Firewall Analyzer saves us money in the long term by enabling us to delay upgrading to a larger firewall," adds Silver. To support Discovery's continuing growth, Silver's IT Security team plans to double their implementation of the AlgoSec Security Management Suite. "Now we can see what is and isn't happening in our security system," he says. "It made a much bigger impact than we thought it would. With AlgoSec's policy optimisation, and the time we save on compliance, AlgoSec has given us a much stronger competitive edge than we had six months ago," says Silver. 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