Headquartered in Manipal, Syndicate bank is one of the oldest public sector banks in India. The bank has now diversified into various fields ranging from online ticketing services to BPO services known as SyndBank Services Limited. The bank recently initiated its ambitious project to network 500 of its strategic branches and ATMs over a 4 year period, under its Centralised Banking Solution (CBS) plan.

In order to secure the core banking transaction, the bank recently deployed UTM solutions from Fortinet.

Cisco Firewall not up to the mark

The rapid growth in the banking transactions, along with the banks' plan to computerise its branches and ATMs presented challenges before the IT team to come up with a better security solution. The Centralised Banking Solution (CBS) prompted them to review their security procedures and infrastructure.

Says Atul Kumar, assistant general manager, IT, Syndicate Bank, “We were earlier using Cisco firewall but with the growth in transactions, the solution was proving inefficient. We were looking for an integrated solution which could protect against the latest viruses, Trojans and other new threats."

Collaborating with Wipro Infotech

Though Syndicate Bank was earlier using Cisco firewall but while deciding to deploy UTM solution it wanted to evaluate the solutions of Checkpoint, Cisco along with Fortinet. Wipro Infotech was the implementation partner. Informs Kumar, “We wanted to go in for an integrated solution needing low mangeability. After evaluating solutions from other vendors, we decided upon Fortinet UTM, since it requires very low manageability and provides various solutions under a single bunch. We have deployed four FortiGate-5020 ATCA-compliant enterprise-class multi-threat security systems, four FortiGate-5001 blades and one FortiManager-400, to protect our core banking systems and our networks which connect our branches and ATMs.”

Wipro Infotech executed the project in about six months at an approximate cost of Rs 2 crore. The solution has been deployed at the bank’s data centre and disaster recovery site. Wipro Infotech people has trained the IT staff of Syndicate Bank on maintaining and managing the solutions.

Serving the customers with secured transactions

With the deployment of FortiManager, Syndicate Bank is now able to monitor platform that minimises the administrative effort required to deploy, configure, monitor and maintain the full range of network protection services. The deployment has provided an array of essential security applications and services, including firewall, antivirus, VPN, intrusion prevention, Web content filtering, anti-spam, Instant Messaging (IM) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) controls and traffic shaping. Fortinet also provides constant update on the latest threats to the bank through its subscription services for its FortiGate series.

“ROI is not at all important for us rather we are mainly concerned about the protection our mission critical applications are getting through it. Investment in security solutions are never measured in terms of ROI but it is acting as an insurance against our other applications. We have been able to receive our customers' faith on our services which is most important to us," answers Kumar when enquired about the RoI yielded by the solution.

After the successful deployment, Syndicate Bank plans to go a step further with its security initiatives by implementing an identity management solution for its employees, customers and mission critical applications. The Bank is evalauting solutions from IBM, Oracle and CA and plans to go live by March 2008.