Multinational Bank Requires SSL Offloading and Application Protection to Stay in Business

This multinational banking and financial services company is one of the largest worldwide banks and is ranked in the Fortune 500 list of the largest global corporations. It has over 18,000 domestic branches and 191 overseas offices spread across 36 countries, with 200,000 employees. Internet banking and the quality of user experience are key to this bank’s business. With 400 million users dependent on the bank’s applications to access accounts and related services, the bank must provide high application performance 24x7 for over 180 applications to keep customers satisfied.

The bank faced a number of challenges, including network expansion, increased dependency on web applications and an increase in the number of cyberattacks. With 400 million users dependent on the bank’s applications to access accounts and related services, the bank must provide high application performance 24x7 for over 180 applications to keep customers satisfied. Due to high network traffic volumes, its existing load balancing solution couldn’t handle the connections per second. Another challenge for this bank is scaling its network to manage international business. Internet banking spans various individual banking divisions, including retail, corporate and consumer, each of which has its own applications and requirements. The bank, which also has to handle large traffic loads from consumer and enterprise customers, was looking for a scalable solution to manage traffic and applications for more than a dozen departments across two data centers. The third challenge for the bank is application security to maintain service availability. Protection of mission-critical application is critical to stay in business. The majority of network traffic that the bank receives is encrypted, which necessitated having the ability to inspect that traffic for attacks.

The bank evaluated a series of ADC vendors with SSL offloading and load balancing solutions, including F5 and Citrix. Radware was chosen because of its ability to support a scalable, virtualized environment that could handle high traffic loads and also safeguard the bank’s applications. Radware’s ADC solution, Alteon, outperformed the competition on connections per second and throughput levels. In addition, the bank selected Radware’s DDoS protection solution, DefensePro, coupled with SSL attack mitigation to protect the bank’s mission-critical applications from multivector and encrypted attacks. In total, the bank purchased 25 Alteons and four DefensePro devices with SSL attack mitigation. Radware provided a virtualized environment, so the bank can optimize its network using less hardware and centrally manage its network based on the requirements of each application. This provided full visibility into all network devices and the flexibility to use resources when and where they are required. Radware Alteon provides a solution for SSL traffic offloading to reduce latency and improve performance because servers inside the network do not have the capacity to process high amounts of encrypted traffic. For protection against encrypted attacks, Radware’s DefensePro SSL attack mitigation solution supports all common versions of SSL and TLS and protects from all types of encrypted attacks, including TCP SYN Floods, SSL Negotiation Floods, HTTPS Floods and encrypted web attacks. Radware’s solution is also able to protect the bank from the most advanced threats in the market today. The solution provides automated machine learning attack protection and mitigation to protect the bank’s network and applications from zero-day attacks, IoT botnet and advanced threats such as DNS, Burst, low and slow and randomized attacks.

• The IT department has been able to reduce the amount of equipment required while providing better traffic processing and security for the bank and its applications.
• By virtualizing Alteon, the bank was able to reduce its network from 1,300 load balancers to just 25 Radware Alteons.
• The IT department can make capacity adjustments based on network traffic processing requirements with Radware’s single pane of glass management system.
• The bank can maintain service availability in the face of cyberattacks with Radware DefensePro and ADC SSL offloading solutions and rely on Radware’s 24x7 Emergency Response Team to assist when an attack occurs.

• Reduced network from 1,300 load balancers to just 25 Radware Alteons