Valley Strong Credit Union gained visibility and control of application activity across 1,200 endpoints with Airlock Digital application control and allowlisting.
About Valley Strong Credit Union
Valley Strong Credit Union operates 31 branches in Kern, Kings, San Joaquin, Solano, and Tulare Counties in California, serving more than 360,000 members. Offering a diverse portfolio of financial products, Valley Strong Credit Union serves personal and business users.
Valley Strong Credit Union required real time visibility and control of applications to augment its existing endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities.
Approach
Valley Strong Credit Union’s EDR provider recommended Airlock Digital application control and allowlisting, prompting the institution to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of the solution.
Achieved full deny by default enforcement in production in less than 60 days
Implemented effective workflows for ongoing policy management and exception management, which maintains the organization’s security posture and manages operational risk
The Customer
With approximately $4 billion in assets, Valley Strong Credit Union is one of the largest financial institutions headquartered in the Central Valley of California in the United States. The organization is an equal housing lender.
The Challenge
As a financial services provider, Valley Strong Credit Union retains large volumes of sensitive customer data, including biometric, location, commercial, and account access information.
To protect this data and its customers and business, the organization implemented a multilayered security architecture, including a recently deployed endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution.
However, Valley Strong Credit Union found its incumbent allowlisting product was incompatible with its revamped security tech stack and had to be replaced.
Valley Strong Credit Union evaluated its requirements and determined it needed an application control solution that:
provided real-time visibility of applications running on all endpoints
ensured every application running in its environment was secure and authorized
enabled rapid and effective responses to requests for new applications to be allowlisted
ran alongside its EDR solution without sacrificing endpoint performance.
The Approach
Valley Strong Credit Union’s EDR provider recommended the institution look at Airlock Digital application control and allowlisting as a potential replacement.
The credit union conducted a thorough evaluation of the solution before deciding in mid-2022 to deploy it across its 1,200 endpoints. Valley Strong Credit Union liked that Airlock Digital could host its solution management server in the cloud, freeing its teams to focus on configuring and using the solution.
“With the Airlock Digital application control and allowlisting solution, we could easily set our endpoints into audit mode,” said a spokesperson for Valley Strong Credit Union. “We had visibility of anything we did not want to allow and could simply bulk-add our desired applications to our allowlist.
“With the number of untrusted executions falling quickly from thousands to just a few a day, we were able to move to enforcement mode across our endpoints within a couple of months.”
Ninety-seven per cent of the cooperative’s endpoints now run in enforcement mode, with all exceptions intentional.
Ease of administration is a key priority for the Valley Strong Credit Union cybersecurity team as they balance their workload with a long list of priorities. In aggregate, team members spend just 90 minutes per week working with the Airlock Digital solution.
Its user-friendliness meant team members needed only a few days to become proficient in its use, while responsive support ensures queries are responded to promptly and effectively.
The team also welcomes the real-time visibility of activity through the solution’s dashboard, which expedites responses to application allowlisting requests, and helps ensure unwanted applications and files are stopped from running.
In addition, Airlock Digital workflows help the team to triage, investigate blocks, and make effective determinations about each application. Inclusion of the score from VirusTotal helps inform relevant decisions.
Overall, Valley Strong Credit Union is extremely impressed with Airlock Digital. “The fact that the Airlock Digital solution is a highly effective first line of defense against files we don’t want running is KPI enough for us!” concluded the spokesperson.
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