Bitdefender - Hiranandani Financial Services

Incorporated in 2017, Hiranandani Financial Services Private Limited ‘HFS’ is an emerging NBFC focused on serving the needs of aspirational Indian entrepreneurs engaged in SME and MSME sector. It offers tailored financial assistance to fulfil the dreams of underserved micro and small enterprises.

Under the honoured aegis of the renowned House of Hiranandani, the Company addresses the growing capital requirements of its customers through secured and unsecured financial products. HFS efficiently delivers a personalized experience to its customers by leveraging advanced technology and data science. Driven by a proficient team and led by experienced management, HFS is committed to cater India’s growing credit demand.

KEY CHALLENGES

The confidential data required a strong cybersecurity solution to block potential threats—both to meet regulatory requirements and to uphold the company’s reputation as a trusted brand. Prevent cyberattacks allowed by unrestricted internet access.

HFS must ensure its information is secure from cyberattacks while maintaining superior system performance for its employees. The company’s prior security solution offered the IT Team limited visibility and reporting about outbreaks. As the earlier product was using Hiranandani Group licenses, the Group System Admins managed the administration and reporting. Its scanning of servers and laptops would also slow system performance and reduce the productivity of users.

Installing firewalls at all locations would have been a costly proposition. However, leaving internet access unrestricted presented a huge security risk. Employees would inadvertently end up opening unwanted websites and unknowingly download malicious code, opening doors to malware and phishing attacks. This made the systems vulnerable, jeopardizing the entire network. In terms of internal threats, unauthorized data sharing by employees was a major concern.

Approach

To resolve these issues, HFS conducted a proof of concept against a range of competitive solutions. HFS turned to Bitdefender Gravity Zone Endpoint Protection with EDR to keep its customer data secure. Bitdefender have great antivirus and malware detection, but it barely consumes any CPU resources. It also integrates USB control, web filtering, advanced reporting, and outstanding partner support - all at a cost-effective price point.”

Implemented Bitdefender Gravity Zone with EDR. Unified Endpoint Prevention, Detection, Response and Risk Analytics for Organization. Enhanced with Human Risk Analytics.

SOLUTION BENEFITS

HFS has deployed the Bitdefender GravityZone Ultra Security solution to protect their systems across all their branches pan India. We had Silicon Netsecure Pvt Ltd as our implementation and support partner. We have deployed Bitdefender EDR in the month of September 2020. The implementation was seamless and well planned by them. Even during Covid lockdown, their team remotely deployed the EDR clients across India. Silicon Netsecure Support Team did the deployment remotely across all HFS branches. Their Managing Director Tushar Parekh had led & consulted us throughout the entire project which in turn helped us analyse the right solution. It was by far one of the smoothest deployments we have seen to the date mentioned Santosh Pawar –Incharge–IT Infrastructure.

GravityZone Ultra strengthens HFS’s protection against sophisticated attacks with effective endpoint detection and response. Aditya Nabar, HFS’s Sr. VP and Head of Information Technology, explains: “Bitdefender EDR has helped us increase our resilience against cyber-attacks. EDR makes detection more accurate and provides a solid background on what’s happening at the endpoint. This helps us decide how to respond—whether we block suspicious files or processes or isolate an endpoint.”

THE RESULTS

After overcoming initial issues in removing existing protection, which is an industry-wide challenge, Bitdefender has demonstrated its strong detection capabilities and increased infrastructure performance and efficiency. For example, Bitdefender completes full scans in a few minutes, compared to an hour previously. CPU utilization has also fallen, from 60 percent to barely registering on usage scales. This helps increase virtualization density for the infrastructure, along with the performance of the systems for end-users.

“We’re impressed with Bitdefender’s minimal resource usage,” says Santosh Pawar. “We simply don’t notice it running, even on our most heavily used systems. Our users are happier, and we gained breathing room to grow.”

“Bitdefender’s reporting is miles ahead of our previous solution” Aditya Nabar said. “With Bitdefender, it’s easy and clear to see everything across our environment on a granular level and then customize how we want our systems to react and perform. When we make policy changes with Bitdefender, they carry through our systems in seconds when before we had to wait for 30 minutes.”

Bitdefender’s layered, multi-stage approach to security has been a major asset to HFS. “With machine learning, behaviour analysis, and detection at various stages, Bitdefender gives us a lot more confidence that threats will be picked up along the line before they inflict any damage. It’s this layered approach that makes the product a real standout compared to competitors.”

Securing against new and emerging web threats

With endpoint protection and web security, HFS is now able to successfully block unwanted internet access, limiting employee internet traffic only to secure websites. According to Nabar, “Having control over user access of web content on our network has helped mitigate the risk of downloading malicious code. Thus, securing users, data and the network against new and emerging web threats.” In particular, features like proxy bypassing, URL filtering, etc. have helped raise the bar of web security within HFS, he added. Since the internet, access for users is defined and there is flexibility to apply different policies to different sets of users as per their requirement, which has been particularly helpful. Further, the solution’s efficient Proxy agent has helped with faster turnaround time, allowing the policy applied to a user to get reflected within 10-15 minutes.

Powerful hybrid solution closes web security holes and keeps an eye on complete endpoint protection, which reduces risk.

To address these requirements, Aditya Nabar and his team started off by evaluating security solutions from different vendors through a Proof of Concept (PoC) exercise. This was further supplemented with Gartner’s review of the respective solutions. Bitdefender made the right impression on HFS for the following reasons:

1. Offered integration of both the Bitdefender GravityZone Ultra Security with EDR and web security solution into a single agent.

2. Was scalable, reliable as well as tried and tested in the market to support the company’s growth and expansion plans.

3. Had a strong support network and competitive commercials.

“With a single agent and consoleBitdefender offered ease of manageability, which was our key selection criterion. We didn’t want managing our security environment to become complex with multiple solutions as we scaled up to support our business growth,” explained Nabar.

“Bitdefender has helped establish data integrity by giving us control over our end point protection from threats as well as plug all internet security gaps with the simplicity of a consolidated solution in a single agent, single console architecture.”

ADITYA NABAR, Sr. VP & HEAD - IT, Hiranandani Financial Services Pvt Ltd