Mark Butler on Reconnex
“Reconnex was the first product
to show inbound/outbound ‘full
data coverage.’ With Reconnex’s
risk discovery capabilities, you
can recursively search historical
data for new or interesting items
and bring in the data you need
from an investigation point of
view. With other tools, you may
or may not have the data you
need, depending on whether the
proper rules had been developed
and implemented. Reconnex
has a scalable, purpose-built
hardware solution to provide full
coverage visibility and awareness
to address the insider threat.”
-- Mark Butler, Security and Compliance Services Manager
Customer Profile - Mark brings a balanced and diligent approach in providing relevant, usable and secure technology solutions. With over 17+ years of well-rounded IT experience with the last 10 years being focused on building and developing information privacy and security programs and related compliance oversight and monitoring services. Mark has a successful track record of building and establishing teams of well rounded, top-tier talent that are quality oriented and provide unique and relevant approaches to business and technical challenges.
Vendor Profile - Reconnex is the leader in information monitoring and protection appliances designed for any organization – including enterprises, government agencies or educational institutions – that wants to protect its brand, maintain compliance, or secure sensitive information. Reconnex’s simple-to-deploy appliance delivers accurate detection while protecting an enterprise before, during, and after any threat to corporate privacy or intellectual property. A privately held company based in Silicon Valley, Calif., Reconnex protects information for over one million users today.
Challenges
- Protect customer information and the valuable brand
- Identify known and unknown threats
- Determine overall exposure to risk
- Comply with regulations
- Reconnex iGuard purpose-built appliance for information monitoring and protection
- Safeguard brand and public reputation
- Provide full visibility to real-time andhistorical data
- Enforce policies
- Ensure regulatory compliance
As the world’s largest tax services company and Fortune 500 enterprise, it’s not unusual to be servicing tens of millions of clients across thousands of retail locations in the U.S. However, in the months leading up to tax day on April 15th, business really heats up. While the company provides comprehensive financial services year-round, tax season presents its biggest logistical and technical challenges. To put these challenges into perspective, consider that “over 40 million taxpayers will file their returns in the last two weeks of tax season,” according to the Internal Revenue Service. Many of these harried taxpayers look to tax services companies to help them organize their financial statements, prepare and file accurate tax returns, minimize their tax burden, and optimize refunds—all of this under extreme time constraints.
REQUIREMENTS
To accommodate this very large influx of business during tax season, it’s not surprising that the world’s largest tax service company radically expands its staff—from 10,000 to 130,000 people—during this period of the year. This presents unique challenges for the security group in charge of protecting the company’s corporate image and sensitive customer data.
“Security should be an enabler,” says Security and Compliances Services Manager Mark Butler. “We need to address risks and find the tools that will allow us to do our job in an ever-challenging, dynamic environment. As a security group, we’re providing a critical service, yet one that can’t become a burden to the internal business operations and processes that make the business succeed. At the same time, our role is critical in protecting our valuable Fortune 500 brand and more importantly our customers’ valuable information.”
Butler’s group is not your typical information security team. They eschew the “cop” approach to corporate security and instead foster a consultative risk and privacy management mentality with strong technical skills. The team is well rounded and motivated to get security safeguards functional quickly and non-intrusively to the business.
To ensure the integrity of their company’s brand while working with thousands of temporary employees presents unique challenges for Butler’s security team. They need to determine:
- What information employees share with partners, vendors, and competitors
- Whether any sensitive customer data is being distributed
- What other information flows in and out of the corporate network
THE SOLUTION
Butler observed developments in the content monitoring space for more than a year and felt these types of solutions could be useful tools to address his organization’s complex challenges. After considering software-based products from various competitors, Butler chose the iGuard appliance from Reconnex, an easy-to deploy, easy-to-use, enterprise-class solution that protects information before, during, and after any threat to corporate privacy or intellectual property.
Reconnex iGuard captures critical information at rest, monitors for data in motion, and prevents breaches through blocking and alerts. It additionally captures data for after-the-fact investigation and search with easy-to-use policies, reporting, and management tools.
“Many of the competitive tools require you to specifically filter for what you’re looking for and capture it as it flows through the network. If you don’t have the proper rules enabled, you will miss the data that could be useful in the future. I wanted the best tool from a comprehensive data coverage perspective and felt Reconnex was the only option.”
The Reconnex iGuard appliance was purchased for its information protection capabilities, which allow enterprises to capture, classify, and store all content; perform historical analysis on the captured data to detect unknown threats; and correlate with known (detected) threats. Competitive approaches require multiple boxes to provide all of the functionality that the iGuard appliance offers in a single system.
“At first blush, it seemed that using the iGuard appliance would require more staff, because of the comprehensiveness of the data capture and coverage. It’s easy to be overwhelmed when you get a look at the sheer immensity of data traversing the corporate network for the first time. But if you prioritize, you can begin to take action and remediate over time.”
The Reconnex iGuard’s indexing and search functions are two aspects of the appliance that customers find particularly valuable. The security team can make specific queries on the fly, looking for attributes such as a particular type of content in a particular protocol at a specific location. If they find troubling data in “wide aperture” search, they can do a more granular search. If some new anomaly comes up in an audit log, they can search ‘ad hoc’ and develop new rules to address the risk issue.
But the iGuard appliance’s ability to help the company determine its overall exposure to risk is most important to large enterprises. In-depth dashboard reporting and text highlighting providing macro-level trend analysis for top-level executives and a micro-level view of all security incidents for IT professionals. A single dashboard view summarizes compliance risks, competitive risks, corporate governance risks, and critical infrastructure risks, giving a high-level overview of the potential insider threat. The security team can even develop their own weighted rating system to characterize risk severity according to corporate risk policies.
By taking a comprehensive, layered approach to enterprise risk management, the security team can ensure the highest quality protection for the organization’s brand.
BENEFITS
The ability to monitor all data and identify risks ensures that private customer data is never compromised, protecting information always. And by securing information, this company also protects its valuable brand and complies with state and federal regulations. “I wanted the best tool from a comprehensive data coverage perspective and felt Reconnex was the only option,” says Butler.
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