March 12, 2021

AWS Customer Snapshot: Financial Services Leader

PKWARE

Background

Digital is redefining the banking industry, as mobile technologies, social media, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are generating unprecedented volumes of data about customers. Financial services firms that are able to harness this data to uncover new business insights and develop the digital tools customers want—even before they know they want them—will be the winners in this new competitive landscape. [Anonymous] was an early leader in the world of data-driven decision-making, but with the advent of big data and the cloud, the speed of innovation can be accelerated. [Anonymous] is embarking on an overall technology transformation to maintain analytic leadership in the new digital era, empowering its thousands of employees with unconstrained data and processing power

Challenges

To make data and processing as unconstrained as possible, [Anonymous] began adopting big data platforms like Hadoop and cloud services from Amazon Web Services. But [Anonymous] also acknowledged that data in these repositories can be unpredictable and difficult to govern. Sensitive data (e.g., PII, PHI, PCI data)—amidst volumes of other structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data—was now being stored, accessed, and shared by thousands of users, sometimes without the knowledge of IT security or governance groups. But denying access to entire data sets because they contain, or may contain, sensitive data would be counterproductive to the company’s goals. The IT security team at [Anonymous] knew additional tools were needed to ensure the usability of more data while maintaining the privacy of all sensitive data across the enterprise—on premises and in the cloud. In particular, compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard was mission-critical.

Company Profile
Company

Financial Services Leader

Size

Large Enterprise

Industry

Financial Services

Our Approach

To ensure all sensitive data is identified, [Anonymous] selected PKWARE to run automated discovery and detection of sensitive data across on-premises and cloud repositories. PKWARE is the only solution on the market that can detect and discover sensitive data in Hadoop, as well as Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3.

With the help of PKWARE, this financial services leader was able to empower data-driven innovation while ensuring PCI compliance.

Use Cases

To ensure all sensitive data is identified, [Anonymous] selected PKWARE to run automated discovery and detection of sensitive data across on-premises and cloud repositories. PKWARE is the only solution on the market that can detect and discover sensitive data in Hadoop, as well as Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3. PKWARE searches continuously, in real time, for all PCI-related data (e.g., credit card numbers) in the repositories. When sensitive data is found, PKWARE makes a call to the company’s tokenization solution, replaces the original value with the new tokenized value, and then sends the data back to the repository. At the same time, PKWARE sends an alert to the data owner. Ultimately, [Anonymous] relies on PKWARE to ensure that there is no sensitive data in any data repository at any time.

Results

PKWARE is helping [Anonymous] meet the key objectives of its data strategy. The company has the use of unconstrained data and processing in Hadoop and is able to leverage customer data for greater business value, while still protecting it and complying with PCI standards. With PKWARE, [Anonymous] greatly reduces the risk and impact of a breach, whether due to an insider’s mistake or an outsider’s attack. [Anonymous] is increasing its use of the cloud, and plans to use PKWARE to ensure the safety of sensitive data across more on-premises and cloud repositories. It is currently using or testing nearly every service offered in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.