Compliance Newsflashes: Philadelphia Stock Exchange Saves Big Money Using Storage Area Network, and more Jan 12, 2006 URL: http://www.financetech.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=175803963
The Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX) is reporting a 75 percent decrease in data storage expense as a result of its use of a storage area network (SAN). The SAN, provided by Brocade Communications Systems, raises the effectiveness with which the exchange archives its increasing records of trades and issues that are mandated by SEC regulation to be stored for seven years. The storage network also expedites the process of data backup while cutting administrative and storage management costs.
The SAN stores data flowing from PHLX's trading floor and electronic systems during the day, and backs up the information at night. This significantly reduces the manual effort for storage compliance.
"If we used conventional direct-attach storage systems, warehousing this much information would be too laborious and unproductive. Moreover, thanks to our SAN, we no longer back up data over the production network, which had in the past diminished bandwidth and slowed delivery of our business applications and resources," said Richard Ward, director of technical services at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, in a release.
The Brocade SAN allows PHLX administrators to consolidate tape and disk systems in a single storage pool, centralizing and simplifying their management. The SAN also optimizes the use of storage platforms within the infrastructure, ensuring systems are never under-used, and reducing the need for additional platforms.
With PHLX anticipating it storage needs to grow to 4 terabytes by the end of the year, it is imperative that the Brocade SAN has not only reduced per-gigabyte costs, but it has also allowed the exchange to reduce it's data storage and back-up staff from three full-time IT professionals to one part-time employee.
SNL Financial Protects Network With CyberGatekeeper
Financial services research and information firm SNL Financial has implemented the CyberGatekeeper solution from InfoExpress to secure its network core. The CyberGatekeeper product family will protect SNL's network from threats emanating from computers outside its facilities that may be infected, misconfigured or in need of updated security patches.
SNL sought to maintain the mobility of its employees, who are often connecting to the network from remote offices, customer sites, hotels and their homes. In order to provide easy remote access to the enterprise network, the company needed to protect itself from out-of-network PCs, laptops, PDAs and other devices that fail to comply with current security policies and may contain viruses, worms, Trojans, malware or any other security vulnerability.
The CyberGatekeeper solution sits between the remote access point and the corporate network, continuously auditing networked systems for policy compliance. Infected or ill-equipped systems attempting to gain network access are automatically quarantined and redirected for remediation.
"We pride ourselves in the timeliness and accuracy of the information we provide our clients, and with malicious attacks becoming more sophisticated and remote computers being especially vulnerable, we felt we had to take extra precautions to ensure the integrity and safety of our information network," said Joel Lothamer, network services manger at SNL Financial, in a release.
Nedbank Deploys Searchspace AML Sentinel
South African corporate and retail banking entity Nedbank Ltd has deployed the anti-money laundering (AML) solution AML Sentinel from Searchspace. Nedbank was the first institution in South Africa to implement the AML Sentinel, which was installed in partnership with IBM South Africa.
"In order to strengthen our anti-money laundering efforts we have deployed the most effective and proven AML solution, built on best practices available on the global market today. We have been able to rapidly integrate the Searchspace AML Sentinel into our existing systems without any issues," said Andre Wentzel, group money laundering control officer at Nedbank, in a release.
Nedbank chose to implement AML Sentinel as a means of complying with the guidelines put forth in the Financial Intelligence Centre Act, which all South African financial institutions are responsible for upholding, with requirements regarding money laundering detection and reporting. The product will assist this effort by automating the identification, monitoring and reporting on possible transactional money laundering activities, as well as integrating manually reported cases of financial indiscretion.
The AML Sentinel system will monitor every transaction on private individual and business accounts, automatically interpreting vast amounts of data as it is processed through the bank's systems. Unusual activity, both known and previously unknown patterns of criminal behavior, is immediately reported to Nedbank's Group Regulatory Risk Service for investigation.