The deployment of Q1 Labs’ flagship QRadar Security Intelligence Platform has also been used to help the insurance company’s operations teams track down problems through “detailed reporting of historical log data from multiple systems,” Q1 said.
Through BGL’s subsidiaries, which include comparethemarket.com, Budget and Bennetts, the group arranges and administers insurance for around 3.5 million customers and employs more than 2,150 people.
Expanding company’s role leads to more demands from its network
Its infrastructure is protected by a multi-layered secure perimeter with traditional firewalls supplemented by IPS and IDS systems managed by a 24/7 network operation centre.
However, expansion of the group’s role, including the provisioning of managed services like those several high street banks, has increased the volume of network and application traffic.
Additionally, previous network architecture at the group was generating around 500 alerts a day, which as then inspected by a four-man information security team, Q1 said.
Q1 said: “The sheer volume of alerts from logs combined with security information from Microsoft-based servers and IBM iSeries mainframes running critical applications were threatening to overwhelm the resources of the team.”
The security company’s software was chosen to try and improve the situation following an extensive selection process.
Reducing false security alerts
Key criteria for a new system included compatibility with BGL’s IBM mainframe and reporting tools to help separate false positives from more urgent matters, Q1 said.
David Ingall, who works on the security team at BGL, said: “QRadar was head and shoulders above the rest in terms of its usability and interface.
“The way it allows us to drill down quickly into an alert and correlate relevant data was extremely impressive. We went from around 500 alerts a day on the logs down to less than 12 using QRadar and we could quickly get to the bottom of any issue in less than 30 minutes.”
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