Allied Bank – Together We Innovate

Our Partner

Commtel provides system integration services with a focus on cybersecurity, information security, data center solutions, and infrastructure projects. It partners with global organizations to deliver high-quality technology products to customers.

Allied Bank works with Commtel to run their 24×7 SOC. Because of that Allied Bank turned to Commtel for advice on EDR.
Commtel recommended VMware Carbon Black EDR, which the bank selected after a thorough evaluation of four products.
The management was initially concerned that there were no prior case studies but the smooth implementation of 7,000 endpoints put paid to those fears.
“Commtel did a good job and we’re very satisfied with the way they rolled out Carbon Black EDR to all 7,000 devices,” said Awais Ejaz, Chief Information Security Officer, Allied Bank.

The Story

Founded in 1942, Allied Bank is one of the largest banks in Pakistan with about 12,000 employees and a network of more than 1,400 branches and ATMs. Serving a diverse clientele, it specializes in corporate, retail and digital banking while providing a variety of universal banking services and technology-based products.

Customer Name: Allied Bank
Solutions Platform: Intrinsic Security
Country: Pakistan
Industry: Financial Services
Success Story: View the PDF

Allied Bank faced increasing cybersecurity risks amid the digitalization of the banking industry. And the bank’s Security Operations Center (SOC) was not adequately equipped to handle the increasingly sophisticated threats. It relied on traditional antivirus solutions that are not able to detect attackers who could have been residing in their network for months, as many as 187 days, preparing and executing advanced persistent attacks.

VMware® Carbon Black® Enterprise EDR™

On-premises threat hunting and incident response solution delivers continuous EDR visibility in offline, air-gapped and disconnected environments leveraging threat intel and customizable detections.

VMware vSphere®

Get the benefits of the cloud for on-premises workloads. vSphere supercharges performance, enhances operational efficiency and accelerates innovation.

To proactively address evolving threats, Allied Bank adopted VMware Carbon Black EDR. The bank was the first and remains the only financial institution in Pakistan to deploy the threat-hunting solution.

VMware Carbon Black EDR now continuously records endpoint data, which the team can access 24×7 in centralized storage to hunt threats in real time.
By integrating VMware Carbon Black EDR with a threat intelligence platform that consolidates and analyzes threat intelligence from multiple sources, the security team is able to instantly identify IOCs from around the world and automate threat hunting.
The bank experienced a 50 percent reduction in security incidents since deploying the solution, demonstrating the effectiveness of proactive threat detection and blocking.
Not only are incidents detected faster but they are also remediated quicker as Carbon Black EDR enables the team to identify root causes easily due to intuitive attack chain visualizations. As a result, response times have gone down from days to hours, which led to a reduction in downtime by a third, ensuring high availability of the systems to customers.

Read the Case Study