Financial Case Study

Challenges

Given that a large number of the key workers within the organisation discussing confidential information via their mobile devices on a day to day basis the customer had legitimate concerns about the confidentiality of information communicated using smartphones and tablets. Executives were also communicating with their VIP and Enterprise clients through consumer based communications apps, which their clients became unhappy with due to reports of hacks and easy interception of well known consumer solutions in 2019.

The Threat of Hacks

VIP clients of this financial institution began questioning the organisation’s methods of communications. This caused the organisation’s senior team to investigate how this could be improved as they were worried about the threat of having their sensitive communications intercepted.

Selection Criteria

The organisation needed a solution to provide secure global mobile communications for key employees and important clients as they exchange very sensitive information.

The selection criteria were set out as follows:

The highest grade open-source encryption technologies available for end to end communications on mobile devices.

The solution would need to integrate with their existing compliance capabilities – which SaltDNA were able to do through our securely archival options.

The ability to have central control of the closed contact list for each user, outside of the device’s own address book.
Fast implementation of an on-premise deployment alongside licenses distributed to internal and external users.
The ability to partially brand the solution to include a splash screen capability.

The Trial

The organisation trialled the system for 14 days with 25 users using a mix of iOS and Android devices. The 14 day trial allowed the organisation to trial the system internally as well as with a handful of their VIPs to gather their feedback. By trialling the system with some external users the customer had greater confidence in choosing SaltDNA to solve the issues they had experienced with their own clients – as well as allowing their senior team to communicate securely.

The Deployment

The company chose to deploy the live system on premise in their own data center. By doing this the company were able to set up the ‘Compliance Mode’ which allowed for the organisation to securely archive the content of their communications. This was in parallel with MiFiD II which they were mostly concerned with. SaltDNA representatives installed the dockerised version of the on-premise deployment remotely. After a few hours, with some tweaks to the configuration to meet the security constraints of the customer’s network, the system was fully up and running.

Benefits

The solution was implemented immediately by senior management as well as the organisations VIP and enterprise clients. The organisation’s CISO said,

“SaltDNA’s secure communications solution provided us with the ideal way to mitigate any risks we believed we had when communicating important internal information as well as communications between our executives and our clients. Our ability to remain compliant while secure was key in our decision to choose SaltDNA. We’ve been delighted with the solution since our deployment and our customers feedback has been incredible to date”.

Once rolled out, the SaltDNA system has been utilised in a number of ways by this organisation for internal communications, client communications and incident response.

Use Cases:

Internal: Whilst it was their clients that drove the procurement of a secure enterprise communications system, the organisation’s internal staff and specifically the senior team embraced SaltDNA for weekly conference calls with executives across the globe.

VIPs / Enterprise: Following the roll out of SaltDNA this organisation’s clients fully embraced the new secure communications solution which was said to improve the relationship between the organisation’s executives and themselves. Worries about their communications being intercepted were squashed which led to an enterprise client purchasing SaltDNA for their organisation also.

Incident Response: SaltDNA’s secure broadcasting capabilities were utilised by the organisation for incident response procedures. The ability to transmit important information out to thousands of users allowed the organisation to send updates to staff in relation to important events. This allowed them to manage possible industry threats with internal staff, as well as with chosen users in other organisations in their sector when there was the threat of potential industry attacks.