PHILADELPHIA, Pa. — Matt Roedell is well aware of consumer wariness about financial institutions' ability and willingness to adequately lock down personal data.

But the vice president of infrastructure and information security at TruMark Financial Credit Union is completely confident about his own organization's security stance.

Roedell said he uses “a layered security model with no one single fix,” an elegant architecture of sophisticated solutions, he said, has satisfied rigorous state and federal audits.

One of his linchpins is a security information management (SIM) solution from TriGeo Network Security Inc.

The TriGeo appliance sits on the network, monitoring the range of input and output activity in real time, collecting reports from the intrusion-detection and other security solutions in the network, sending out alerts, creating logs and, if necessary, stopping potentially dangerous activity.

“One of the things I show in my product presentations is I play solitaire on a computer and TriGeo kills it and posts a message to me saying, 'Michelle, go read your company manual,'” said Michelle Dickman, president/CEO of TriGeo in Post Falls, Idaho.

The TriGeo SIM appliance is aimed at the mid-tier market and has a client list of approximately 600 organizations, including about 75 credit unions (including billion-dollar-plus Alliant and BECU, along with $939 million TruMark Financial) and the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. departments of State and Energy, Dickman said.

The TriGeo solution's ability to send alerts, kill applications, and, if necessary, shut down machines separates it from the “traditional log management vendors, most of whose products are for the Fortune 500 companies that might have 30 security analysts and 30,000 nodes on the network. They're looking more for forensic stuff,” Dickman said, “not really for technology that makes an active response.”

It's that proactive factor that helps make TriGeo “basically a backbone of my information security response,” said TruMark Financial's Roedell. “Without it, I'd definitely need at least one more highly qualified engineer with a variety of skill sets, including Cisco.

“I now have only one. Because of the way it's engineered, I can configure the TriGeo product and pass it on to other people who may not be an expert in any one particular area, and rely on that one person I have, who really is what I would call a guru in that product.”

Roedell said he now has a TriGeo agent on every PC in his credit union's network, monitoring activities ranging from port scans by potential hackers to outgoing e-mail.

“It offers a lot more functionality than a lot of appliances out there, like the ones big banks are using that lose all your data,” he said.

The TruMark IT security chief added: “As for data leaking out of your organization, one of the biggest holes is your e-mail. At how many financial institutions can someone simply e-mail to their home hotmail account a list of Social Security numbers and dates of birth? That shouldn't even be possible.”

Dickman at TriGeo agreed. “We all know the statistics,” she said. “Some 70% of bad things happen from the inside not the outside. That's why we created our product to take a targeted, rifle approach to what's going on inside your network, not a shotgun approach that just provides you with logs to go back later and see what happened.”

Roedell thinks that approach is valuable enough to be marketable.

“We spent about $50,000 on TriGeo, which wasn't that much money when you sit down and look at it. We're close to a billion-dollar institution, and your reputation is everything. You've to be able to maintain it,” he said.

“In the long run, I believe that financial institutions that excel in information security are going to be able to use that as a marketing tool. That's where I see the free market going,” he said.

–mrapport@sc.rr.com

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Banking on the Box - TruMark Financial Using SIM Appliance to Lock Down the Data

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