Fortune 100 Bank Averts Audit Crisis Through Environmental Separation with Illumio

A Fortune 100 bank faced compliance violations for its inadequate ability to prove separation of development and production environments. Potential penalties included heavy fines and cessation of its ability to trade on the Nikkei exchange. The bank’s business, credibility, and reputation were at stake.

They failed an audit after executing millions of dollars worth of trades and were under pressure to deliver by a specific timeline. The risk of repeated audit failure was everyone’s problem, but the bank didn’t have a clear solution. Network-based solutions meant reconfiguring a major portion of the network and involved a heavy burden of infrastructure upgrades and re-IPing. The significant fiscal and operational expenses of this approach were untenable – as was the service outage to the business.

Aside from financial and operational impacts of re-architecting the network, the mechanics of segmenting development from production wouldn’t work. With a large number of multi-tenant hosts running multiple instances of the same process, VLANs were ineffective. Software-defined networking solutions could not be deployed successfully. The last option was moving development, but no one could explicitly define what development was, and the risk of breaking production was too great.

The bank’s infrastructure team saw the need for a host-based solution leveraging native application firewalls that follow the workload regardless of where it runs. But when they attempted a homegrown solution leveraging iptable batching, they struggled to scale it in the Windows portion of their environment.

The bank chose Illumio Core™ (formerly ASP) for its ability to segment development from production environments without requiring network changes. It is now fully automated and operated overseas by less than one full-time equivalent employee.