News
Bremer Bank Selects ForeScout CounterACT for Real-time Visibility, Guest Access and Control Automation
August 2014 by Marc Jacob
ForeScout Technologies, Inc. announced that Bremer Financial Corporation has successfully deployed ForeScout CounterACT™. ForeScout’s agentless approach enabled the bank to migrate off of its existing 802.1X infrastructure and provides comprehensive, real-time network visibility across all endpoints, resulting in improved compliance with security policies without negatively impacting user experience or productivity.
Bremer Financial Corporation is a privately held, $8.7 billion regional financial services company, jointly owned by the Otto Bremer Foundation and Bremer employees. The bank has approximately 1,900 employees throughout its 87 branches and corporate locations, as well as 4,200 endpoints, excluding servers.
Prior to deploying ForeScout, Bremer had an existing network access control (NAC) implementation to manage a diverse range of corporate and user-owned devices. However, it required heavy IT support and was prone to false positives and other disruptions. To address those issues, the bank chose ForeScout CounterACT to boost security and access control for its network. The new solution offers an agentless approach and has enabled the bank to reduce management overhead, improve system resiliency and enhance user experience while delivering significant time and cost savings for IT.
“We required a fluid, secure method to identify corporate assets and secure access for personal and guest devices at the same time,” said Joseph Thornell, security technical architect at Bremer Bank. “In addition, it was very important that we offer and maintain a good user experience, especially because our previous solution caused a lot of frustration in the user community. We needed the new solution to help fix the negative perception the original one had created. ForeScout fit the bill, and we chose it almost immediately.”
Benefits realised by Bremer Bank after deploying CounterACT include:
Guest Management – Bremer now has the ability to manage its devices while providing additional access points for guests and employee mobile devices.
Policy Creation and Enforcement – Bremer can use CounterACT to create custom security policies across its organisation as well as enforce its BYOD and mobile security policies by identifying, limiting or blocking unauthorised applications.
Malware/Malicious Activity Identifications and Isolation – Bremer uses CounterACT to block non-corporate and threatening devices from gaining network access to its sensitive IT resources.
Automation, Time and Cost Savings - The ease of management and extensive support ForeScout affords compared with Bremer’s previous NAC solution cut down on calls and saves the IT team and help desk significant man-hours.
Security Product Integration – Using ForeScout’s ControlFabric technology, the bank has integrated CounterACT with its IBM Security QRadar® Security Information Event Management (SIEM) solution to further mitigate security issues.
“The visibility we’ve achieved into our endpoints and high level of security we’ve maintained have been invaluable,” said Thornell. “ForeScout CounterACT delivered as soon as we plugged it in. The ability to see and manage over 4,000 endpoints, as well as the ability to integrate with other security solutions is instrumental
