Leading Invest Bank UAE – SDN and Microsegmentation
One of the Leading Invest Bank in UAE has gone truly Software define across the board.
Problem Statement: Business and Technology
The organization had a strategic vision to transform their traditional network to SDN with Micro segmentation driven by an effort to eliminate their existing and legacy Cisco ACI Multi POD architecture plagued with operational issues.The discernible objectives for a software define data center was driven by improving operational efficiency, security and cost effecting transformation to freeing the architecture design from network topology constraints, enabling automated network provisioning, security policies activation and simplified network and security administration.This would be made possible by visibility into and control of the east-west traffic, decoupling physical network hardware from the compute ecosystem and applying the virtual network abstraction layer based on user application profile, security postures, classification of data type and business context like department and geographical locations.Additionally Security Groups apply firewall rules based on functionality and access requirements. These Security Groups also allow us to easily contain VMs having vulnerabilities, risks and infected code.
The Solution
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60% better security
3rd party integrations
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Zero touch mobility
across sites through data center consolidation
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90% compliance
to industry security standards
- HUCO proposed VMware NSX Enterprise, vRealize Network Insight, vRealize Log insight, vSphere & SRM to be implemented with micro segmentation and enforcing firewall policies to the workload within the L2 segment.Network micro-segmentation activates security controls pinned to smaller groups of virtual resource. Micro-segmentation has been the Gold standard of best practices from a security perspective.Huco has done end-to-end implementation including assessment, design, deploy and validation for two sites at a relatively lesser cost of its replacing physical hardware counterpart.The solution was designed by a team of experts, standard frameworks and best practices to build a software defined virtual data center that faster provisioning times, automated policy activation, insight and security of east-west security traffic.
- Once the planning and pre-prequisites phase was completed in a couple of weeks, The enterprise wide solution implementation was delivered in a span of 4+ weeks. The best practices approach included single application POC, enabled flow monitoring to understand existing network traffic, applying network and security roles according to classified patterns and eventually arriving at microsegmentation rules to be implemented.Huco combined vmware recommendation and Huco’s learning into reusable and automated blueprints/rules towards translating customer’s vision into a robust solution.Customer and Huco team also had a joint Governance team to monitor, measure and track timelines, quality and approvals across releases.The bank was enabled with a platform that provides insights, security controls and management of network traffic seamlessly.The implementation tasks , outcomes and error knowledge databases were documented and recorded through design, configuration and auditing phases before training and handing over the network and security operations team.
