Institution : Navellier & Associates, Inc.
Industry : Investment Advisory
Location : US
Navellier & Associates Inc. (http://navellier.com) is a financial investment advisory firm headquartered in Reno, Nevada. The firm manages 6,175 accounts totaling an estimated $2.76 Billion of assets under management. Navellier manages a variety of portfolios for institutional clients and also helps thousands of individual investors achieve their financial goals. Navellier & Associates employs 39 full-time employees including 10 investment professionals.
Bob Fuller, Director of Information Technologies, is solely responsible for the IT operations at Navellier & Associates. As an investment advisory firm, which is into trading, they have to strictly adhere to the IT Audit regulations laid down by Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC ) and Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) which mandates Navellier to conduct regular audits of their network infrastructure.
ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer
"We have traders who access our network through VPN and we wanted to have complete visibility of who was accessing our VPN at any given time. Since we trade we are under FINRA and SEC regulation which mandates us to audit and store all our firewall logging data,"says Bob Fuller, Director of Information Technologies, Navellier & Associates Inc.
Navellier had a log server capturing the raw logs and used home-grown scripts to parse these raw logs and extract meaningful insights, but found it time consuming and next to impossible to quickly extract the kind of real-time information that could help them mitigate threats and stay compliant to audit regulations.
A third-party audit of their firewalls, rules, retention policy and reporting pointed out to certain deficiencies in their firewall logging and real-time monitoring of their firewalls.
They immediately started looking for a solution that could provide complete visibility into their firewall traffic so that they are alerted in real-time in case of a security breach. And more importantly help them meet FINRA, SEC, and SOX compliance requirements.
The IT Team needed a powerful network security data analytics tool which could give them in-depth analysis and detailed reports on the network bandwidth utilization, inbound-outbound traffic, live traffic analysis with provision to compare with historical averages and spot a recurring trend or sudden spikes in traffic requiring immediate attention.
Navellier evaluated several free and commercial solutions, but most of them didn't match up to their critical requirements and a few that had the features that Navellier was looking for were obnoxiously priced. His search for firewall security management software finally led him to Firewall Analyzer from ManageEngine, which met all their critical requirements and was also priced right.
" We selected Firewall Analyzer because it was easier to setup than all other products we evaluated, it had the best management and graphical user interface, and provided us detailed firewall reports to meet FINRA, SEC, and SOX IT audit requirements" says Bob
Firewall Analyzer deployment at Navellier was pretty quick and with a helpful ManageEngine tech support (fwanalyzer-support@manageengine.com) Bob got it configured for real-time monitoring and instant threat notification within minutes! In Bob’s own words "I look at Firewall Analyzer as an automated tool which helps me in my day-to-day management of my IT environment. I depend on it!"
Coming to the reporting section of the product, Firewall Analyzer provides hundreds and hundreds of built-in reports which deals with real-time network traffic trends, employee internet monitoring, bandwidth utilization, virus / attack signatures, etc. Navellier Associates has scheduled Monthly VPN Usage Reports to automatically deliver (email) to its network team, which will help them analyze on the number of users who have logged into their network, the time they spent in VPN, resources accessed, etc. This report provides their COO with metrics for tracking their VPN user activities.
" I am looking forward to the upcoming (third-party) independent IT Security audit of our network and I am feeling pretty confident that this audit will be substantially better than the previous one, since I have got Firewall Analyzer helping me with real-time monitoring of my network perimeter devices." says Bob Fuller