What's happened?
Recorded Future has reports that the British Government is proposing sweeping change in its approach to ransomware attacks.
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Maximising performance, scalability, and compliance for a leading innovator in online banking
About Tandem Money
Tandem is 'The Good Green Bank', a fully regulated digital app‐based bank founded on the idea of putting customers' needs first whilst helping them save more than just their money by pushing for a sustainable future. The acquisition of green lender Allium in 2020, an established green homes lender, accelerated Tandem's mission into the green space. Tandem offers savings, mortgages, and loans to help customers green their properties, and eventually their lives.
Challenges
The key driver behind Tandem's ongoing digital transformation was earning a full banking license in 2018 - something that had been a core focus of their infrastructure's evolution. This meant their infrastructure would need to fulfil all legal and compliance obligations around the handling of financial data, and also demonstrate the highest standard of operational resilience.
At the time, Tandem's IT and telephony infrastructure was hosted at various separate data centres, while their banking application was hosted on AWS services, and a separate site set aside for workplace recovery. Although multiple sites were involved here, the whole network depended on the London office, creating a single point of failure.
After a comprehensive evaluation of various suppliers, Tandem engaged with Exponential‐e to ensure these critical elements could be securely interconnected in order to maximise performance and scalability and ensure all requirements for full bank status were achieved. Exponential‐e's deep experience in the financial sector was critical here, providing Tandem with complete confidence that the partnership would provide a positive contribution to their journey.
Solution
The networking solution delivered by Exponential‐e interconnected all Tandem sites via a high-performance WAN - a fully managed low‐latency solution that ensured consistent performance across all sites. This was implemented by a dedicated Exponential‐e account team, who project managed every stage of the deployment to ensure there would be no service disruption and that Tandem's long-term goals remained the primary focus throughout the deployment and beyond.
Critically, this fulfilled all compliance requirements regarding the handling and storage of financial data, while ensuring Tandem's teams would have the right tools at their fingertips at all times. To ensure a disruption free migration process, secure connections were created between Exponential-e's self‐owned network and Tandem's AWS services, allowing for a successful consolidation of the different elements of their infrastructure, and providing IT teams with a higher level of control and visibility.
As the partnership between Tandem and Exponential‐e evolved, a combination of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Office 365 was established as the ideal combination of solutions to further optimise Tandem's overall efficiency and enable effortless collaboration between their various teams, regardless of where they were located, with security policies applied automatically and role‐based segregation opening up a wide range of opportunities for remote working.
Throughout 2020, when the COVID‐19 pandemic forced organisations worldwide to rapidly transition to a remote workforce, the inherent flexibility and scalability of Tandem's infrastructure and a robust business continuity plan showed its true worth, as the entire workforce were able to begin working remotely with minimal disruption to day‐to‐day operations, and no compromise in terms of security and compliance. This option had already been utilised on an ad‐hoc basis by Tandem's engineers, but a scenario where it would need to be utilised on a company‐wide basis had been considered and factored into the business continuity plan, with tests taking place to ensure such measures would be viable, should they ever be needed.
In this way, Tandem has demonstrated how the right infrastructure, with the support of the right technology partner, provides organisations in even the most challenging sectors with the agility to pivot in response to unexpected, large‐scale shifts in the digital landscape. Tandem's long‐term digital transformation continues, with plans in place to bring its core banking suite in house and into the Cloud, for a further layer of control and flexibility.
Solution benefits
- High‐performance VPN connectivity across multiple sites, with secure connections to the core banking suite provider.
- Full compliance with all applicable regulations regarding the handling of financial and sensitive data.
- A stress‐free transition to remote working, with zero compromise in the security of users' financial and sensitive data.
- A strong foundation for ongoing Cloud transformation and consolidation.
Reduce complexity, increase speed and reliability
Exponential-e is a trusted technology partner for organisations across the Finance sector, offering innovative solutions that drive security, compliance and optimal performance at all levels.
Find out more in our Finance Brochure.
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Security agencies in the United States have issued a new warning about the Black Basta ransomware group, in the wake of a high-profile attack against the healthcare giant Ascension.
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Do you know Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev?
If you do, there's a chance that you might well on the way to receiving a reward of up to $10 million.
Law enforcement agencies across the US, UK, and Australia have named Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev as the mastermind behind the notorious LockBit ransomware group, estimated to have extorted $500 million from companies worldwide.
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To Test or Not to Test? - When it comes to IT disaster recovery and remediation processes, regular testing is not a 'nice to have' - it's absolutely essential!
This isn't hyperbole on my part. You just have to look at the news on any given day. We've all heard the horror stories of organisations in both the public and private sectors experiencing prolonged downtime during disasters due to inadequate preparation, lack of testing, and the unsuitability of their legacy remediation processes and systems.
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The international hotel chain Omni Hotels & Resorts has confirmed that a cyberattack last month saw it shut down its systems, with hackers stealing personal information about its customers.
In the aftermath of the attack, hotel guests reported that they had been forced to check in on paper, that room keys didn't work, and all phone systems and Wi-Fi were offline.
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Dev Ops Consultant at Exponential-e, Alistair Doran, write for 'Tech Native', discussing Software engineering and the cultural changes needed to move to a digital first economy. Read the article Read the article
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Paulo Henriques, Head of Cyber Security Operations at Exponential-e, writes for 'Global Banking and Finance', discussing the cyber security steps businesses should take to mitigate the risk of botnets. Read the article Read the article
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Chief Innovation office at Exponential-e, Jonathan Bridges, speaks to 'Intelligent Ciso' about the importance of having a robust cyber security plan in place and the steps businesses should take to achieve this, such as military-grade cyber security solutions to mitigate the threat of ransomware attacks. Read the article
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Tom Richardson, Cloud Sales Specialist for Media at Exponential-e, speaks to Technology Dispatch about the importance of protecting sensitive data by ensuring the correct protocols are in place and training for staff at all levels is prioritised to mitigate these cyber risks. Read more here
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Head of Public Sector at Exponential-e, David Lozdan, speaks to City AM about the investments in data-driven digital healthcare and how this is effectively improving patient outcomes through the National Pathology Imaging Co-operative (NPIC).
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Amy Springford, Director of Client Relations at Exponential-e, speaks to SheCanCode, discussing the importance of inclusivity in the workplace and how this would support retaining female workers, as well as implementing flexible working policies for women to juggle their work-life balance.
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Afshin Attari, Director of Public Sector and Unified Platforms, writes for 'Government Transformation Magazine' discussing the four core technologies which could transform the Public Sector.
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Our Chief Innovation Officer, Jonathan Bridges, writes for 'Security Boulevard' about the importance of understanding and preparing for ransomware attacks as an IT professional, and the steps you should take to mitigate risks for your business.
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On the 18th March 2024, the Information Commissioner's Office issued its updated guidance around the issuing of fines when organisations have been found liable for the integrity of their customers' or end users' data being compromised. It is already well-established now that failure to ensure critical data remains secure will result in costly fines, as we have seen repeatedly in multiple high-profile cases over the years.
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In October 2023, the British Library suffered "one of the worst cyber incidents in British history," as described by Ciaran Martin, ex-CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
The notorious Rhysida ransomware gang broke into one of the world's greatest research libraries, encrypting or destroying much of its data, and exfiltrating 600 GB of files, including personal information of British Library staff and users.
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Any organisation that has tried to recover from a ransomware attack knows that it can be time-consuming and costly. Companies hit by an attack must choose between paying a ransom or recovering encrypted data from a backup.
Unfortunately, ransomware gangs are too aware that they can leverage significantly higher ransoms from their corporate victims if they have also compromise the company's backups. For this reason, we are seeing more and more cyber attacks targeting backups because they know that organisations desperately need them to recover if they want to avoid paying a ransom to cybercriminals.
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Now more than ever, effective collaboration and communication are the keys to success. Throughout 2020, we saw a widespread shift in how we interact with each other, both in and out of work, and how we stay connected to our colleagues and customers. Just consider the following:
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The digital landscape is evolving at a rate that's never been seen before and is set to continue accelerating in the years ahead. In such a fast-paced environment, the ability to work flexibly, responding to unexpected challenges and optimising the time-to-market for new innovations, is critically important for all organisations - whether they're ambitious start-ups or established global leaders. While IT infrastructure must certainly support this - hence the widespread phasing out of legacy infrastructure in favour of increasingly sophisticated Cloud transformation strategies - any new technology will be of limited effectiveness if processes and methodologies do not evolve in parallel.
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After several years of serious global upheaval, it is clear that resilience, agility, and the ability to adapt to the unexpected are critical priorities for all organisations – regardless of size or sector. However, this accelerated pace of change has, in many cases, revealed the limitations of existing IT services. With an increasing emphasis on on-demand services and a highly fluid workforce, legacy services and their systems often struggle to support new propositions and customers' evolving needs, which will – in turn – make maintaining a competitive advantage difficult, if not near impossible.
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