Client Profile
A mid-sized financial services firm operating across three continents with over 1,500 employees and strict compliance needs triggered by expanding regulatory obligations (PCI-DSS, SOX, and GDPR). The client faced rapid cloud adoption and increased remote access requirements post-pandemic, exposing vulnerabilities in their existing perimeter defenses.
Challenges Faced
Key security concerns included:
- Legacy firewall infrastructure unable to scale or adapt to hybrid-cloud environments.
- Inconsistent rule management, leading to frequent misconfigurations and outages.
- Lack of centralized monitoring, causing delayed threat detection and response.
- Compliance pressure, especially around auditability and change control.
Solution
COE Security implemented a tailored Managed Firewall as a Service (MFaaS) engagement, combining:
- Next-Gen Firewall Deployment: Unified threat management, deep packet inspection, and SSL decryption.
- 24/7 SOC Monitoring: Real-time analysis and alerting through a dedicated security operations center.
- Firewall Rule Optimization: Reduction of redundant or risky rules and implementation of least-privilege policies.
- Compliance Reporting Engine: Auto-generated reports mapped to regulatory frameworks.
Operational Excellence & Continuous Protection
- Eliminated manual rule changes by introducing automated change control workflows.
- Reduced attack surface through zero-trust segmentation rules.
- Enabled real-time visibility into traffic with integrated dashboards.
- Lowered false positives via machine learning-assisted alert tuning.
- Achieved near-zero downtime with high-availability firewall clustering.
Security Strategy & Governance Reinforced
- Aligned firewall policies with business risk via continuous governance reviews.
- Deployed pre-configured templates aligned with NIST, ISO 27001, and PCI-DSS.
- Introduced a firewall lifecycle governance model with quarterly audits.
- Instituted Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for change and access accountability.
COE Security Services Portfolio
- Managed Firewall as a Service
- SOC-as-a-Service
- SIEM Integration & Tuning
- Vulnerability Management
- Penetration Testing
- Compliance Readiness (PCI, HIPAA, ISO, etc.)
- Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR)
- Identity & Access Management
- Secure Cloud Posture Management
- Incident Response Retainer Services
Implementation Details
- Deployed firewalls across on-prem, cloud (AWS, Azure), and edge in less than 3 weeks.
- Integrated firewall logs with existing SIEM for correlation.
- Trained internal IT and DevOps teams via tailored workshops.
- Delivered configuration and incident playbooks for Tier 1/2 SOC handoff.
- Weekly reporting with executive dashboards and compliance summaries.
Results Achieved
- 99.8% reduction in unapproved firewall changes.
- 20% improvement in incident response time due to centralized alerting.
- Passed PCI-DSS audit with zero firewall-related findings.
- Raised security maturity score from 2.4 to 4.1 (out of 5) within 6 months.
Client Testimonial
“Partnering with COE Security gave us control, clarity, and confidence. Their firewall-as-a-service offering transformed our patchwork approach into a world-class perimeter defense, ready for modern threats.”