Why go GOLD with SHIELD Edge in 2021?

Why go GOLD with SHIELD Edge in 2021?

In case you missed it, in 2020, BITS launched our SHIELD Security Portfolio.  SHIELD protects your financial institution from cyber threats, while your employees are both on-premises and when working remotely.

As part of our SHIELD Security Portfolio, Edge is a fully managed firewall solution designed to stop outside threats to your network and control access from the outside world. The core component of our Edge defense platform is the Cisco Firepower Threat Defense platform. 

In 2019, our security team saw 20% of all potentially malicious events blocked across BITS and customer platforms in SHIELD Edge Silver. After moving to SHIELD Edge Gold, there was an increase to 69% of all potentially malicious blocked, resulting in a daily average of almost 2.3 million additional events blocked in 2020, thanks to geo-blocking and proactive IPS capabilities.

Edge uses a complete a portfolio of next-generation firewall solutions, backed by industry-leading threat intelligence, to protect your workloads, while accelerating key security operations and streamlining security policy and device management across your extended network.  Additionally, SHIELD helps you extend your financial institution’s network security beyond the firewall with malware protection, identity-based routing, multi-factor authentication, and more.

Firewall protection is an important part of any financial institution’s security protocol, but many financial institutions struggle with the intense level of work required to keep them updated in an era of a constantly changing threat landscape.

SHIELD Edge Gold allows customers to access a secure firewall platform in a shared environment with other banks. Due to the shared infrastructure set up, customers have access to BITS’ highly certified engineers and around-the-clock network monitoring, without the need for an in-house dedicated resource.

Over the last 30 days, across BITS’ customers on our SHIELD Edge platform, there were over 17B total firewall events correlated by Secureworks, with 83M security firewall events.  This was then reduced to 25M correlated security events, with 10 security incidents that BITS engineers investigated.

In addition to the cooperative intelligence of a shared environment, BITS is dedicated to working exclusively with community financial institutions, and we have the knowledge of your unique audit and regulatory requirements. 

SHIELD Edge Gold includes Intrusion Prevention Services (IPS) along with Geo-Block to prevent connections from foreign countries, customized as needed for your bank.

• IPS allows for flexible, policy-based blocks for inbound or outbound connection from specific endpoints, branches or your entire bank
• Geo-Block allows for flexible inbound or outbound blocking of any country based on your bank needs

SHIELD Edge Gold also includes SHIELD Advisory services to ensure your bank is prepared for your next audit or examination.

The SHIELD EDGE platform also improves your bank business continuity design as each branch can communicate to BITS independently and does not rely on a central bank location. BITS managed network allows branch-to-branch (lateral) communication as well, but internet (vertical) communication is routed directly to BITS and avoids the bottleneck effect of most on-premises firewall configurations.

With SHIELD Edge, your financial institution can take advantage of the benefits of Secureworks, without the expense and required expertise of managing the platform. SHIELD Edge creates a bridge between you and all the state-of-the-art resources of Secureworks.

Interested in learning more?  Contact Kevin Gemmell at kevin.gemmell@bitsnetwork.com or visit BITS.us/security for more details on Edge and the entire SHIELD Security Portfolio.  Current BITS customers can also reach out to their Account Manager who can provide more information on the best solution for your financial institution.