Transferring Security Confidence
As part of their proactive security policy, First European Transfer Agency (FETA) chose StoneGate to give added security confidence.
Commitment to Technology
Technology is one of the key defining features in the successful operation of fund servicing. As
such, leading international transfer agency, FETA is committed to developing and upgrading its
system architecture to ensure that it can cater for new developments in the industry.
SARA (Shareholder Accounting & Registration Application) is FETA's proprietary system, which ensures efficient and effective management of shareholders' registers. SARA is accessible through an internal Client-Server connection or via an Internet interface. This Internet application operates on a real time basis and includes multi-currency, multi-class, multi-share class and multi-promoter applications. It has the capability of handling both accumulating and distributing share classes and can cater for both retail and institutional investment needs.
"Our clients include financial institutions, financial groups, banks and large corporations. They can rest assured that we are continuously upgrading our system architecture in order to cope with new market demands and, more importantly, providing "state-of-the-art" technology to their businesses", explains Dominique Trine, Vice President of FETA.
"This commitment to providing the best systems has given us a key advantage, in as much as it gives us the flexibility to incorporate new products and technology developments into our client's solutions, as they become available".
Staying One Step Ahead
As a trusted subsidiary of Dexia Banque Internationale à Luxembourg (Dexia BIL), FETA undertakes regular security audits to ensure that its systems meet the levels expected by their customers and each client is given access to the security audit details as required.
"Companies must realise that security is like a moving target - you have to review your set up
regularly to keep up to date and trying to stay one step ahead can be an expensive business. What
is the use, however, of holding on to old technology to try and save costs when the people trying
to compromise your systems are using the latest technology?" asks Trine.
"At our last IT security audit we came to the decision that we would incorporate two layers of firewall protection with both firewalls coming from different vendors. Not a cheap option but one which would give an extra level of confidence!"
FETA already knew of Stonesoft, from their positive experiences with the StoneBeat high availability and load balancing solution, and included StoneGate in their evaluation of a number of firewall products. The extent of functionalities, which StoneGate offered as standard including load balancing, high availability, ease of installation plus the straightforwardness of administration and upgrades made it stand out from the crowd.
Rules of Security
A firewall without a well-designed rule base is practically useless from a network security point of view. If the rules can be bypassed easily, the firewall will lose most of its effectiveness. The rules determine the conditions for accepting or rejecting connections,translating IP addresses and load balancing inbound/outbound traffic and therefore can take a long time to set up.
"We had a lot of objects and rule bases in our existing firewall, which we wanted to move over
to the StoneGate. The StoneGate rule base conversion tool eased the migration and saved a lot of
time. All in all the installation, configuration, translating the rule bases and migrating data
from the existing firewall to StoneGate took about 5 hours in total" recalls Trine.
"Also, with our existing firewall we had to scroll through every single rule to find the one we wanted to work with - when you have over 150 rules with around 10 information columns each, this makes administration incredibly complex and time consuming. With StoneGate we are able to group rules by type, for example all ftp rules or all http rules etc, thus only having to look through a smaller subset for the rule we want to work with. This has saved us a lot of administration time and frustration", says Trine.
Goodbye to Patch Management
"StoneGate has not only allowed us to take a step forward with our security but has freed up valuable administration time."
- Dominique Trine, Vice President, FETA
StoneGate combines a hardened Linux operating system, a high availability firewall, virtual
private network (VPN), load balancing, clustering and multi ISP failover all out of the box on 2
CDs (one firewall engine and one management system). "Previously if a machine crashed we would have
to re-install the operating system plus any patches, re-install the firewall plus any patches and
then the load balancing software plus any patches - an administrator's nightmare!" comments Trine.
"With StoneGate all we have to do is re-install the latest version and it automatically sets up the operating system, firewall, load balancing and all the other features in a matter of minutes. There is no worry about managing several different packages and multiple patches. Also the firewall configuration can be loaded from a back-up in minutes. Staying ahead of the security game is tough", concludes Trine.
"StoneGate has not only allowed us to take a step forward with our security but has freed up valuable administration time so that we can continue to work on keeping ahead".
About First European Transfer Agent
First European Transfer Agent ("First European") was created in 1994 as a fully owned subsidiary of Banque Internationale à Luxembourg (BIL). It was the first service provider in Continental Europe specialised in the provision of Transfer Agency ("TA") services (subscriptions, redemption orders, maintenance of share registers and all other business related to the sale of fund units or shares). Fund promoters were, as a result, for the first time able to entrust a dedicated transfer agent with the handling of subscriptions and redemptions on behalf of their retail clients worldwide, without having to make use of a nominee arrangement.