IDB Bank secures customer data, enables digital transformation and optimizes compliance efforts

Challenge

• Protect highly sensitive financial data in a high-risk sector
  The banking and finance industry remains a prime target for cybercriminals. With vast amounts of sensitive customer and financial data at stake, any compromise poses serious risks to brand reputation, regulatory standing and customer trust. The rise of advanced digital technologies has only increased the complexity of securing this data effectively.
• Keep pace with an evolving threat landscape and regulatory pressure
  David Smithers, CIO at IDB Bank, highlighted the strain on IT teams:
  “It’s challenging for IT professionals to keep up with the constantly evolving threat landscape, all the compliance regulations and technology trends like quantum computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning – which can all be used for good or evil.”
  Ensuring continuous protection and availability of client data was a daily imperative.
• Support a large-scale digital transformation securely
  Upon joining IDB Bank, Smithers was tasked with driving a five-year transformation to build the “bank of the future.” The extensive scope of this initiative introduced significant change-management and security risks that needed to be addressed.
• Strengthen weak change control processes
  Early in the transformation, Smithers identified gaps in operational and security practices — particularly the bank’s end-to-end change control process.
  “I discovered early on that there were improvements needed to the way IT operations and security were managed, as our end-to-end change control process was quite weak,” he said. Because ServiceNow played a central role in the bank’s transformation, Smithers required full closed-loop change control. This is what led him to Netwrix Change Tracker. “I was looking for a robust solution to track what should have changed to what had actually changed.”
• Conduct a rigorous review of viable FIM and change control solutions
  With only a limited number of feasible solutions in the system, file integrity monitoring, and change control space, Smithers and his team needed to run a comprehensive market and technical evaluation to ensure the chosen tool met the bank’s high security and operational standards.

Netwrix solution

• Strengthened IT operations with a security-first change management approach. IDB Bank selected Netwrix Change Tracker to protect sensitive customer data while improving operational discipline. The solution’s SecureOps™ strategy brings together foundational security controls from CIS and NIST with rigorous change management practices. “Change Tracker was a great match for our environment,” Smithers said, noting how it supports the bank’s defense-in-depth model.
• Clear differentiation between good and bad changes. With as many as 1,000 changes occurring each week, the bank needed reliable visibility to identify harmful or unauthorized modifications. Netwrix Change Tracker makes this possible by tracking hardening standards and automating CIS critical security controls. Smithers emphasized this value: “Detecting bad changes is much more difficult than people think.”
• Built-in CIS Benchmarks and simplified tool consolidation. Netwrix is one of the few vendors officially certified by CIS, and Change Tracker includes a wide range of CIS Benchmark assessments across major platforms. This breadth of coverage allowed IDB Bank to consolidate tools and reduce operational complexity. “The product architecture, the rich feature set and ability to implement the closed-loop change cycle has been very effective in securing our IT operations,” Smithers explained. “I don’t want to run thirteen different agent-based solutions when it does all for us.”
• Continuous compliance with automated reporting. By automating compliance checks and reporting, Change Tracker helped the bank achieve continuous adherence to multiple regulatory frameworks. This significantly reduced the time and effort spent on manual cybersecurity, audit preparation and change management tasks. “My team were handling the change tickets manually before, but now it’s happening automatically every single day. The product has dramatically improved and streamlined the way we do things and is saving us a lot of time,” Smithers said.
• Secure digital transformation through ServiceNow integration. With native ServiceNow integration, approved changes are automatically validated and reconciled against change requests. This ensures every modification is tracked with full auditability, supporting safe and controlled digital transformation.
  Smithers highlighted this tight alignment: Change Tracker enables the bank to manage its transformation initiatives “in the most secure way possible.”

Key benefits

• Support of “Defense In-depth” strategy via forensic analysis
• Full closed-loop change control via integration with ServiceNow
• Reduced number of IT security tools
• Monitoring and automation of CIS critical security controls
• Support of digital transformation goals
• Improved data security against the latest cyber threats