Financial Firm Secures Its Private Cloud
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- PowerBroker Identity Services
Tech Stack
- VMware ESX
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Active Directory
- Solaris
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Cybersecurity & Privacy - Identity & Authentication Management
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Private Cloud
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Cybersecurity
Services
- System Integration
- Testing & Certification
About The Customer
The customer is one of the world’s most recognizable financial institutions, serving businesses and other financial organizations throughout the United States and internationally. It provides a range of financial services that requires highly available and recoverable production information systems made possible through VMware virtualization. The firm has a comprehensive virtualization plan, selecting VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMware ESX bare-metal hypervisors to provide support for a majority of internal and external customer-facing deployment scenarios. By the end of 2009, more than 80 percent of the application servers would be VMs hosted in VMware and the infrastructure would span more than 30 ESX servers.
The Challenge
The financial institution was facing challenges in validating virtualization security, controlling access, and securely authenticating users. An internal security audit revealed that its VMware ESX systems, Red Hat Linux VM guests, and Solaris systems were configured with file-based methods of user authentication and access control. The staff responsible for user accounts lacked the expertise to manage and synchronize accounts for every type of operating system. The firm was using Active Directory 2003 R2 for its Windows servers. The administrators attempted to implement Active Directory authentication on their ESX hosts by using VMware’s configuration scripts. Although Active Directory’s Kerberos authentication provided single sign on, it provided only part of the desired solution.
The Solution
The company began testing commercial AD-bridge software products that would support all the operating systems in its data center, including its VMware ESX servers. In addition to providing Kerberos authentication that is compatible with Active Directory, AD-bridge software also provides security policy management and audit and reporting functions. The firm chose PowerBroker Identity Services (PBIS) for its ability to integrate VMware ESX and other operating systems into Active Directory for access control and authentication, control security and sudo with group policies and Active Directory’s hierarchy of organizational units, audit access and activity on VMware ESX systems, and BeyondTrust’s exceptional support and professional service offerings. Moving completely to Active Directory for user management saved the institution significant time in provisioning new users.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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