Enterprise Security, Compliance Management, and Security Awareness Training Solutions

Executive Summary

Overview
Citizens Business Bank (Citizens) is the largest bank headquartered in the Inland Empire region of Southern California. With assets of over $6 billion, the bank employs 800 people in 33 cities, with 44 commercial banking centers in the Southern California counties of Riverside, San Bernardino, Los Angeles, and Orange, as well as California’s Central Valley area. Citizens has been recognized as one of the safest, strongest, and best managed business banks in the United States, and one of the top performing banks in California. It has a reputation for excellent customer service and low employee turnover.

Barriers
The bank needed to strengthen its information security posture in order to address mounting regulations associated with security and audits, and to enhance customer loyalty. While threats to security and the technology to combat the threats are constantly evolving, Citizens’ security processes were highly manual. In-house security expertise was limited, and the Information Technology (IT) Department sought to concentrate on core capabilities. The team chose to identify and partner with a full-service solution provider to help architect, monitor, and manage the bank’s security infrastructure. In addition, because the bank was growing rapidly, the solution needed to support the seamless integration of new financial centers into its fold.

The Solution
Citizens initially chose Symantec Consulting Services to conduct a comprehensive security assessment and architect the security components necessary to protect the bank’s information infrastructure. Citizens also chose to centralize its security management responsibilities for the new infrastructure with Symantec Managed Security Services. Symantec services professionals consolidated and assumed charge of managing and monitoring the firewalls, intrusion detection systems, critical host systems for online banking, and other security processes. As the relationship strengthened, Citizens upgraded its Managed Security Services contract and added additional Symantec software solutions for mail security, IT compliance, and systems management. One of the more recent initiatives includes the Symantec Security Awareness Program for employee security training.

Benefits
A result of its relationship with Symantec, Citizens is achieving substantial business value. The Alchemy Solutions Group conducted a Total Operational and Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis of the different solutions deployed and quantified business value in the following areas:
• Security Monitoring and Reporting Savings: $3,491,317 in labor savings and cost avoidance utilizing Symantec Managed Security Services
• Network Monitoring Savings: $1,457,319 in labor savings leveraging Symantec Critical System Protection
• PC Lifecycle Savings: $1,815,100 in labor savings from deploying Symantec Ghost Solution Suite
• Compliance and Policy Reporting Savings: $170,798 in labor cost savings leveraging Symantec Control Compliance Suite
• Crash and Disaster Recovery Savings: $165,870 in labor and hardware cost savings with Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery
• Spam Email Filtering Savings: $2,200,589 in labor cost savings from deploying Symantec Mail Security 8260
• Security Education Savings: $22,843 in cost savings leveraging Symantec Security Awareness Program

For more information on Alchemy Group or to download this document, go to http://www.alchemygroupinc.com/category/research/bva/