Federal Case Study #2

Financial Institution Protects Legacy Assets

A multinational banking and financial services corporation that undertook multiple network security and compliance initiatives to reduce operational complexity and risk.

Challenge

The financial institution faced a number of challenges. First, legacy applications and infrastructure were running numerous core business operations. These legacy applications were unable to integrate with modern identity and access management (IAM) platforms, including modern methods of user authentication (such as SAML and RADIUS). Next, the institution needed to move 2 million firewall rule sets handling north/south traffic off the internal data center firewalls. Managing this with firewall rule sets was becoming resource intensive and error prone. Finally, the company wanted to benefit from the cloud, but required a consistent secure access solution across its hybrid IT environments.

Solution

Appgate’s Software-Defined Perimeter was selected to secure access to the institution’s mission-critical legacy applications. Serving as a pass-through black box, Appgate SDP integrated with the organization’s IAM solution to secure access between its legacy and modern applications and comply with regulatory requirements.

Appgate’s Federal Division worked to make sure the Software-Defined Perimeter provided the financial institution with the ability to control user access from a single solution across both their legacy on-premises infrastructure and cloud environments. Appgate SDP solution has allowed the business to rapidly enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) across critical applications, meet regulatory compliance standards, reduce risk and provide assurance that the right level of security is always met.

Outcome

With a Software-Defined Perimeter, the institution applied modern security to its legacy applications without modification. This extended the life of the legacy assets helping to reduce costs and risk.

Appgate SDP Live Entitlements feature was used to replace its static access rules with dynamic, context-sensitive access policies enabling the moving of the 2 million user rules sets. It also provided consistent security across all applications – new, legacy, on-premises and cloud.

Using Appgate’s Software-Defined Perimeter, the institution enforced the Zero Trust model so anyone attempting to access any resource had to authenticate first. Zero Trust ensures that once proper access criteria is met, a dynamic one-to-one connection is generated from the user’s machine to the specific resource needed.