The Challenge: Enhancing Security While Simplifying Management
“Sixty to seventy percent of threats start from an endpoint,” says Stefan Galea, First VP and Head of IT Infrastructure & Information Security at FIMBank. “It became clear to us that we needed to focus our efforts on what provides the most value. That seems to be protecting the endpoint itself.”
Founded in 1994 and operating out of Valletta, Malta, FIMBank p.l.c. is a global provider of trade finance, factoring (the sale of accounts receivables to a third party—or factor—at a discount), and forfaiting (the sale of medium and long-term receivables at a discount). A client-driven financial services provider focused on optimizing business performance, FIMBank enables business growth with tailor-made trade finance solutions providing exporters with accelerated receivables and importers with extended credit
Delivering a comprehensive portfolio of factoring services, FIMBank’s international factoring network covers operations in Brazil, Egypt, Greece, India, and the UK. A key focus area for the bank is innovating to launch new receivable finance techniques customized to meet the needs of emerging markets.
“One of the biggest problems we had with the other tools,” adds Christopher Bugeja, Senior Specialist for Information Security at FIMBank, “was the amount of man-hours involved in managing the products.”
Automated Endpoint Protection
“Through market research, we saw SentinelOne beginning to really shine,” states Bugeja. “That’s when we took an active interest in it.”
FIMBank chose SentinelOne’s platform for its advanced, next-generation endpoint protection platform (EPP) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities.
The only security solution providing full network visibility directly from the endpoint, SentinelOne delivers autonomous endpoint protection through a single, light-weight agent that successfully detects, blocks, and responds to all malicious threats. Designed for ease of use across both on-premise and cloud environments, the platform reduces human overhead by utilizing multiple AI engines to automatically quarantine and eliminate risks in real-time
But FIMBank was looking for more than just an endpoint security solution.
Leveraging Advanced MDR Services As An Additional Defense
“If we let a team of experts do this part of the job for us,” explains Galea, “they would be able to do it better than we ever could because they do this on a day-to-day basis. It allows us to concentrate on our core activities without having to build—from scratch—a full SOC that would have to operate on a 24/7 basis.”
In addition to deploying SentinelOne, FIMBank takes advantage of Vigilance, SentinelOne’s 24/7, follow-the-sun Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service to augment their in-house Security Operations Center (SOC). Staffed by a highly-trained group of cybersecurity analysts, Vigilance empowers SOC teams by accelerating the detection, prioritization, and response to advanced cyber threats at a global level. As soon as a new threat is detected, Vigilance analysts review the threat, identify ways to mitigate the risk, and provide actionable recommendations.
“We structured our proof of concept in terms of making sure that whatever we were introducing would not have any detrimental impact to the rest of the network,” highlights Galea. “The second concern was making sure the SentinelOne agent was able to detect the different types of threats that we expected it to. And the last thing we wanted to be sure that the managed service, Vigilance, was responsive to our needs.”
Protecting Your Endpoints, Safeguarding Your Business
“If there is an incident of some kind, the SentinelOne agent will flag it, alert us, and alert the Vigilance team,” says Galea. “The relationship we have with the Vigilance team is as if they were an extension of our own in-house team. The presence of Vigilance has improved the assurance that—no matter what—we’ll be able to protect the bank.”
Responding to more than 1,000,000 threats annually with an average response time of under 30 minutes, SentinelOne Vigilance shatters the industry’s standard 24-hour response time. With published SLAs that it lives up to, SentinelOne Vigilance offers the extra layer of security today’s enterprises demand.
