Symantec Solution Case Study

Securing Remote Access for Financial Services Users

Background:

This Financial Services customer is focused on delivering high quality, cost effective services for its clients, their members, employers and advisers.

The Challenge:

Like most organisations, the customer wants to support its users’ ability to work from anywhere, and providing secure access to corporate systems is essential. As a government owned financial services company, data security and audit trails are exceptionally important.

In order to demonstrate its compliance with best practices, the customer wanted to enhance its current Citrix secure remote access solution with two-factor authentication. This would provide an additional level of comfort and auditability for work carried out from outside the office. Staff were using hard tokens (fobs) to access the VPN, but not specifically for the Citrix solution.

The customer recognised that they required a solution that could provide a simple user experience and be easy to manage.

The Solution:

The customer wanted external guidance from an experienced security practice, and selected Data^#3 based on its ability to supply integrated security solutions. Data^#3’s Symantec specialists offered the team expert advice alleviating the requirement for time-consuming in-house skill creation/development.

Data^#3’s consultant first undertook a review of the customer’s existing environment with a view to extending it with a two-factor authentication solution. The initial brief was to provide access to an initial group of 25 ‘privileged users’.

The consultant’s intimate product knowledge played a significant role in the project’s success. As soon as it became obvious that the upgrade path wasn’t straightforward, the consultant raised tickets with Symantec on the customer’s behalf and managed the process of identifying and planning for the best way forward.

While the plan had been to build on the existing environment, a number of complexities came into play with software licensing, versioning and compatibility, and Data^#3 instead recommended that it would be more time and cost effective to start with a fresh installation of the Symantec VIP two-factor authentication product and integrate it with Citrix NetScaler environment. This would provide a clean operating environment on which to build as the customer extends the rollout to its broader user base.