Published Friday, December 04, 2009 11:22 AM by Adam Bennett

Profile
One of India’s leading and fastest growing private sector financial services companies
Experts in asset management and mutual funds
Company net worth of $1.6 billion

Industry
Financial

Websense Integration
Websense Data Security Suite™

“We opted for Websense because it was cost effective and provided powerful protection.”
Murli Nambiar
Vice President and Head of Information Security
Reliance Capital

Challenge
To protect confidential information and ensure regulatory and corporate compliance

Solution
Websense Data Security Suite™

Benefits
Significant reduction in the exposure of critical data to potential misuse or fraud

Download the Reliance Capital case study in PDF format.
Watch a video about how Reliance Capital are using Websense.

Overview

Reliance Capital is one of India’s fastest growing financial services companies and is primarily focused on mutual funds, life insurance, consumer finance and broking and distribution.

Ranking amongst the top three private sector financial services and banking groups in India, the organisation has over 25,000 employees and 15 million customers.

The Problem

As a financial organisation, Reliance Capital is responsible for significant amounts of confidential customer data and regulatory and corporate compliance is a key priority. With five operating businesses and a heavy flow of information, the organisation realised it needed control over data moving across systems, geographies and group companies.

“Data sent to third parties for processing and other outsourced activities is usually insecure and provides numerous opportunities for misuse. The main issue for us was whether the movement of confidential information was for genuine business need or malicious in nature,” says Murli Nambiar, Vice President and Head of Information Security at Reliance Capital.

Senior management at Reliance Capital recognised that the potential for loss was high and it was critical that its data was secured from accidental or intentional leaks. Today’s essential business tools, such as Web and email, presented a challenge to its current systems and the organisation was increasingly concerned about the repercussions – both in reputation and financially - if sensitive data was leaked.

The Solution

To address the ongoing concerns it had, Reliance Capital set up a ‘Data Shield’ project. The business looked at three key areas: data flow analysis, document rights management and data loss prevention (DLP) implementation.

Following the evaluation of several DLP options, Reliance Capital decided to implement Websense Data Security Suite. “Though all the evaluated DLP solutions were quite mature, we decided to opt for Websense because it provided powerful protection as well as being cost effective,” says Nambiar.

Websense Data Security Suite is a comprehensive data loss prevention solution that discovers, monitors and protects sensitive data. Its sophisticated fingerprinting technology identifies and creates a ‘digital fingerprint’ for each piece of confidential data located throughout the organisation, enabling the solution to monitor that data no matter how it is manipulated or where it is sent. Backed by the intelligence of the Websense Threatseeker™ Network, which scans the Internet and more than one billion pieces of content daily in search of threats, Websense understands both the data itself and the destination where it is being sent.

By understanding the business context around the data, Websense Data Security Suite accurately determines if an action is a legitimate business process and applies the appropriate protection policies.

The Results

Websense Data Security Suite provides Reliance Capital with a powerful level of data security. It protects unclassified data that may not be rights protected and also ensures data that may be incorrectly classified by employees – with or without intent – is safeguarded.

According to Nambiar, implementation of the solutions has reduced the risks of confidential information being potentially misused. “We believe that since only authorised critical data leaves the organisation the benefits in having Websense are tremendous for our business.”