As a leading Thai microfinance company, Ngern Tid Lor Public Company Limited (Ngern Tid Lor), or TIDLOR has over 1000 branches nationwide. Guided by their vision of empowering people and enriching lives, TIDLOR offers a range of products and services that create opportunities for many under-banked Thais who often lack access to formal financing.
The company recognised the importance of having visibility and protection for customer data and applications on their public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). The need to secure data took on tremendous prominence in the current context, as the company belongs to the Banking and Financial Services (BFSI) sector, which has become a popular target for cyberattackers of late.
“While we have never faced any issues on cybersecurity till date, TIDLOR realised the importance of being prepared for possible threats and decided to fortify ourselves better in the current environment,” says Pakamon Tulyapizitchai, SVP, Head of Digital Transformation, TIDLOR. She goes on to add, “When our on-premises infrastructure was nearing end- of-life and needed to be renewed, we opted for a solution from Palo Alto Networks, as they offered us the advantage of incorporating multiple public clouds with on-premises virtualised data centres.”
Data protection and application visibility across public cloud
Operating in the BFSI industry, TIDLOR needed to bolster the security for their virtualised applications, data and workloads, in order to prevent the risk of data loss that could lead to business disruption. Digital transformation initiatives undertaken by TIDLOR has meant faster, more efficient network architectures that incorporate multiple public clouds, on-premises virtualised data centres, with security as a network functions virtualization (NFV) component.
“With the earlier security solution, we had three departments and coordinating between them was cumbersome. Now, we have a completely new hierarchy for security management, involving specialists and experts on cloud projects, making it easy to monitor data across the organisation,” Pakamon adds.
TIDLOR had data on both the private and public cloud, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It was imperative for the company to gain visibility and protection for customer’s data and applications on the public cloud IaaS. They needed a solution that allowed for segmentation and listing, controlled resource access, detect and prevent malware from gaining access, moving laterally between workloads, and simplified management through automation.
“TIDLOR has used solutions from Palo Alto Networks in the past and therefore when we needed a refresh, the security team within TIDLOR championed solutions from them. The proposed solution addressed all the challenges we faced and gave us the additional benefit of value for money,” reiterates Pakamon.
Superior visibility, control and threat prevention with the VM-Series
Being the first deployment of their VM-Series on the Gateway Load Balancer works with AWS in Thailand, the Palo Alto Networks team extended an incredible amount of support to ensure that solution deployment was seamless.
TIDLOR called for proof of concept in the beginning of 2019, and the Palo Alto Networks solution ranked the highest compared to competitors, both in terms of migration and integration.
The VM-series deployment was on AWS cloud and was integrated with AWS’s new native infrastructure component called Gateway Load Balancer. The VM-Series virtual firewall from Palo Alto Networks supports increased application-level visibility and enables precise control by providing visibility across all ports and providing relevant information on the cloud environment to help make rapid, informed policy decisions. The solution enables ongoing security optimisation through network insights and prevents breaches. This is done by identifying and controlling applications and granting access based on users to prevent known and unknown threats. By segmenting mission-critical applications and data, the new solution has improved the security posture of TIDLOR to prevent cyberthreats and breaches. With centrally managed policies across both physical and virtual firewalls, and streamlined workflow automation, TIDLOR has now reduced staff time spent on monitoring and remediation from days to minutes.
"After installing the new solution, TIDLOR has benefited from increased application-level visibility, precise control, security optimisation, prevention of security breaches, automation of endpoint security and increased productivity."
– Pakamon Tulyapizitchai
SVP, Head of Digital Transformation, TIDLOR
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