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Largest Bank in Central and Eastern Europe Chooses DeviceLock to Increase Corporate Endpoint Security
March 2009 by Marc Jacob
Established in 1841, Sberbank is the largest banking institution in Central and Eastern Europe and the undisputed leader of the Russian banking industry, accounting for over a quarter of national banking assets. Sberbank has 17 regional head offices and more than 20,000 branches throughout the country across 11 time zones. It offers services ranging from savings to private and investment banking, and a complete range of lending and credit services to more than one million corporate and 250 million retail customers. Sberbank runs a proprietary countrywide settlement system and has correspondent relations with over 200 banks around the world.
Recognizing the rapid developments in data transfer and storage technologies and the potential threats they pose to corporate information security, the IT Security Division of Bashkir Branch of Sberbank identified a pressing need to implement more granular and reliable control over employee access to local ports and peripheral devices on office computers. The problem was that “all-or-nothing” access enforced through physical or logical port blocking in the Bank’s IT system had become insufficient for facilitating personnel duties and operations. Besides, the “full-blocking” method of port access control was just unacceptable for some device types – like USB keyboards and mice.
“The Bank’s IT security system audit is one of the most important tasks for our IT Security Division,” explained Vyacheslav Rykov, Deputy Head of IT Security Division with Bashkir Branch of Sberbank. “A recent audit led us to conclude that the question of whether or not to implement flexible device and port access control on corporate computers couldn’t be postponed any longer.”
After thoroughly testing a number of device/port control solutions, Bashkir Branch chose DeviceLock software from DeviceLock, Inc. because of several functional advantages including the ability to precisely control, log, shadow-copy, and audit end-user access to any type of computer ports and peripheral devices. Other functionalities that were important for Sberbank was the native integration with Microsoft Active Directory® platform, offering easy deployment and management of DeviceLock agents. DeviceLock also offered centralized audit log collection and storage, the ability to shadow the data that end-users copy to removable memory devices, USB and media white listing support; and multi-console management architecture that supports several administrative roles.
Vyacheslav Rykov elaborated on the reasons why Sberbank adopted DeviceLock. “Not only does the DeviceLock solution fully comply with our information security policy, but its functions seamlessly complement it, increasing the Bank’s overall IT infrastructure protection. In addition to the DeviceLock solution, we are also developing administrative and regulatory documents and deploying network security and anti-virus solutions. DeviceLock provides comprehensive event and data logging and audit capabilities, completely covering all functional requirements related to this element of endpoint security so there is no need for us to use any additional tools for port/device access control,” said Rykov.
“Another advantage of DeviceLock is that it does not require deep technical expertise or significant time and labor resources for installation, maintenance and support. In fact, the product’s “unattended mode” installation went so smoothly that most of our employees didn’t even notice DeviceLock had been installed and was running on their computers. Thanks to comprehensive product documentation and real-time support from DeviceLock’s Technical Support Service if any technical issues come about we have the confidence that they can be fixed quickly and painlessly,” concluded Vyacheslav Rykov.
