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K
uwait Finance House (KFH) is
considered a pioneer in the
banking phenomenon known
as Islamic Finance or Shari’a
Compliant Banking. KFH is the first Islamic
bank established in 1977 in the State of
Kuwait and today it’s one of the foremost
Islamic financial institutions in the world.
KFH has steadily expanded its business and
achievements to lead the Islamic banking
industry and become a pioneer financial
establishment. KFH’s group banking network
spans across several regions worldwide,
with 504 branches, 1,263 ATMs and
approximately 15,000 employees.
Challenge
KFH, as all other leading financial
institutions, was facing a growing
cyberthreat landscape and Majeed
Behzadi, Executive Manager, Group
Information Security Management and IT
Infrastructure Design for KFH, explains why
the organisation felt compelled to look for a
comprehensive security solution.
FEATURE: FINANCE
Solution
After a thorough market evaluation, the
team concluded that ArcSight Enterprise
Security Manager (ESM) in combination with
ArcSight Logger was the best fit for their
breach defence and compliance needs.
ArcSight ESM provides powerful insight into
real-time correlation of security events, while
ArcSight Logger delivers a cost-effective
universal log management solution that
unifies searching, reporting, alerting, and
analysis across any type of enterprise
machine data.
It has built-in content for regulatory and
security compliance requirements to ease
the burden on KFH’s security teams. KFH
engaged with a local implementation
partner and within two months the ArcSight
driven SIEM environment was live. Set up
in a data centre-based cluster environment,
Disaster Recovery is guaranteed through a
separate site set up.
Commenting on how ArcSight supports
the day-to-day operations within the KFH
“We had a basic security monitoring
solution but it didn’t give us the correlation
capabilities we felt we needed in a much more
sophisticated threat landscape,” he said.
Even as a pioneer of the
financial establishment, Kuwait
Finance House faced a growing
cyberthreat landscape. With
the organisations needing to
implement a comprehensive
security solution it turned
to Micro Focus.
“There was also limited development
and support on the solution, and we
wanted to look for an alternative before
ending up with an obsolete solution. We
need to comply with very strict financial
services industry regulations, including
PCI-DSS, and we have a requirement
to manage a Security Information and
Event Management (SIEM) environment
with 24/7 monitoring. We are also
audited regularly and need to provide
comprehensive reporting in support of this.”
Majeed Behzadi, Executive Manager, Group
Information Security Management and IT
Infrastructure Design for KFH
Micro Focus
implements security solution for
Kuwait Finance House
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