Why a Financial Data Firm Bet Security on Palo Alto Networks
Prisma Cloud from Palo Alto Networks sponsored this podcast.
Both data and governed access to it play an integral part of our lives. With the freedom to access vast amounts of pervasive data comes the responsibility of ensuring protection is in place. For an organization, data protection is required for a range of access points, including apps, the hosts, the containers and serverless architectures.
In this edition of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, we speak with Darian Jenik, risk product security lead architect for public cloud migration at Refinitiv.
Why a Financial Data Firm Bet Security on Palo Alto Networks
Refinitiv offers financial-related information, data and analysis to 40,000 institutions worldwide. Jenik discusses how Refinitiv uses Prisma Cloud as a foundation for its custom cloud security reporting app. Among the themes covered, he shares his initial security challenges that drove Refinitiv to consider a third-party solution like Prisma Cloud, as well as what drove the need for the innovative new custom app.
This podcast was recorded for The State of Cloud Native Security Virtual Summit that took place on June 24.
As a “giant data round” for the world’s largest trading platforms and most of the top financial institutions, one of the company’s first ambitions after being spun off from Thomson Reuters was to migrate from a traditional data center operations to a cloud environment.
Finding the right security platform to meet Refinitiv’s requirements involved finding a provider that had the tools to “find and identify those things that could be a problem,” Jenik said. The company opted for Prisma Cloud after looking at “all all the major brands,” while Prisma Cloud “checked all the right boxes for us.”
“It allowed people to see what was going on and to see what had changed,” said Jenik. “Our operations team was very crucial to making that decision.”
Among the challenges, the time invested in building the requisite scripts in house for security was not paying off. Prisma Cloud offered an automated alternative consisting of “hundreds and hundreds of different rules that you can then customize and tailor to the environment,” he explained.
Refinitiv’s next phase after its adoption of Prisma Cloud for security involves improving its whitelisting processes. “There are hundreds of reports going out, which is what we are refining and are also learning. We see stuff coming on the report and then there’s the team’s pushback saying we must do this,” Jenik said. “We’re learning how whitelisting is incredibly important… because you don’t want to get overloaded with reports, alerts and reports that aren’t true.” With an overload of often false positives, “we’ve got to be able to turn that off because the teams will get alert fatigue,” said Jenik.
Some of Jenik’s takeaways from cloud native technology about Refinitiv’s adoption of Prisma Cloud was that previously “we weren’t confident that we were seeing everything or that we were even looking in the right places.”
“This gives us that confidence — we see alerts and stuff we hadn’t considered that could be happening or we should worry about. So, it has taught us that you really don’t know what you don’t know, until you get something like this.”
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