Maximizing Uptime and Profits in a Highly Secure Custom Application Environment

Client Overview

Proponix is a financial services consortium that consists of Wells Fargo, Australia New Zealand Bank (ANZ), Bank of Montreal, Barclays UK, the Union Bank of California, and CGI-AMS. Proponix provides trade finance processing in an IT outsourced model. One of Proponix’s key services is to provide letters of credit – documents issued by a financial institution assuring payment to a seller of goods and services during a business transaction. As an international financial conglomerate with billions of international trade transactions annually, Proponix built, hosted, and managed a custom application to process these letters of credit transactions.

The Challenge

The Proponix environment is a complex infrastructure consisting of hundreds of servers and network devices that must be highly secure, given all of the internal financial processing. These include multiple systems and technologies, ranging from Cisco, Juniper BMC, F5, Windows, Solaris, Oracle, EMC, and NetApp. Proponix elected to seek outsourcing assistance in the monitoring, managing, and developing of their critical banking application that processes $6.5 billion in international trade transactions annually. As such, the cyber security requirements were extensive due to the number of international banks involved, the sensitivity of the data, and the volume and dollar value of trade transactions.

Neovera Solution

Neovera, a trusted provider of managed security services, developed a custom cyber security solution to manage, operate, and monitor the client’s environment. Multiple vendor firewalls were used to provide network security from intruders and to create multiple internal network segments internally for additional security. Several intrusion detection systems were used to secure the entire Network Intrusion Detection system (NIDs), Host Intrusion Detection system (HIDs), and network/security correlation tools to secure the client’s servers. Remote access to servers was secured with stand-alone IPSEC hardware virtual private networks (VPNS) and multi-factor authentication using hardware tokens. Neovera also used trusted operating system technology developed for the U.S. Department of Defense to secure some of the core servers.

Proponix was originally architected on Solaris (Sparc, including Trusted Solaris) and AIX on multiple database platforms – Oracle and SQL Server. Neovera performed multiple Oracle migrations, upgrading both database and clustering technologies. SQL Server upgrades were also performed. As part of the CGI acquisition and data center move to Canada, Neovera migrated all Solaris systems to Linux and also performed the database migrations from Oracle on Sun Solaris to Oracle on Linux.

Bottom Line Results

The Proponix project is an excellent example of Neovera’s in-depth expertise of cyber security, threat intelligence monitoring, and custom application management. Neovera successfully architected, implemented, and managed production and disaster recovery operations on a 24×7 basis for Proponix for five years. During this time, Neovera successfully maintained 100% scheduled uptime in an environment that consists of over 300 servers and network devices, while ensuring the security of all systems. In a situation where application uptime was directly proportionate to profits gained, Neovera was able to deliver consistent results and exceed client expectations.