This customer in the legal industry is a full-service international powerhouse with approximately 2,000 attorneys in 27 offices around the world, covering the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. In 2008, it became the first US-based law firm to attain more than $2 billion in yearly revenue. Their departments are each recognized as leaders in the legal profession. This firm has one of the largest and most sophisticated litigation practices in the world, offering expertise in a multitude of substantive areas. Our environmental practice has been at the forefront of this rapidly changing area for the last two decades and was named as the top firm in the world for environmental expertise. This firm has a long and rich history in tax matters, dating back to founding partner Dana Latham, former Commissioner of the US Internal Revenue Service.

Challenge

Because of the characteristics of the business, this firm has amassed substantial volume of sensitive information stored in thousands of laptops and servers globally. This sensitive and confidential information must be protected rigorously to meet the strict compliance requirements by the regulations and industry standards. Potential data leakage and internal abuse could have disastrous impact to the core business of the firm.

The IT team is responsible for most operation and maintenance job of the IT infrastructure which plays the critical role to protect this sensitive information. Furthermore, there are also software engineers from outsourcing partners who require access to this sensitive information. This added to the complexity for data protection and audit. The challenges faced include ensuring that operations and maintenance jobs are adhering to strict guidelines and that Segregation of Duties (SoD) are correctly implemented. Sensitive and critical operations to systems and data stored centrally must be recorded so that they can be retrieved in the future for investigation and forensic purposes. Network behavior must be monitored for anomaly. This company has difficulty meeting these challenges prior to the decision of implementing Session Auditor.

Solution

Session Auditor was deployed at the critical network segments to record all the network traffic between servers and their maintenance terminals, and also for both internal and outsourced parties. The recorded operation data was centrally stored and analyzed. The internal auditors monitor and track all suspicious network behaviors reported by Session Auditor. Regular reports on network behaviors and analysis are generated and submitted to management team and archived for external auditors during the audit exercise.

Benefits

Session Auditor delivers great business value to this customer. These benefits are:

• All the network operations to targeted sensitive data are recorded and analyzed. This provides confidence and guarantee to the management team.
• Complete recording and storage of all operational activities provides valuable forensics resources and enhances regulatory compliance for the company
• Session Auditor helps mitigate the potential dissension between the firm and outsourcing partners