Overview
Banco Popular Dominicano (BPD), Dominican Republic’s leading privately owned bank and a subsidiary of local financial group Grupo Popular, offers a range of financial services and products including checking and savings accounts, credit and debit cards, loans, investments, and insurance. With around 7200 employees, more than 200 branches, and 700 ATMs, the company has the broadest network in the country.
The BPD internet banking platform is one of the most visited websites in the Dominican Republic and is responsible for the greatest number of online banking transactions in the country which helped it to achieve the number 1 spot in the 2021 Digitalization Ranking published by the country’s banking regulator Superintendencia de Bancos (SB). The company started to operate in 1964 and is based in Santo Domingo.
Challenge
Banco Popular Dominicano database environments were extremely complex, with databases on separate servers waiting for the system’s indexes. They were on shared servers and consolidated due to the expense of infrastructure.
Diego Laverde, CISO, explained that “this type of consolidation added a level of complexity that created significant challenges to our reliable, productive ecosystems. We needed a database security platform that mitigated them and enabled us to continue to deploy a solution that would not adversely affect the production ecosystem.”
Since Banco Popular Dominicano’s current solution wasn’t meeting their needs, the company began discussions with Multicomputos, one of the main integrators in the Caribbean and Central America that provides information technology solutions to corporate and institutional clients, to replace the solution. The previous solution required too much time, too many resources to operate, and lacked the capacity to scale to meet the high demands of the production environment. Banco Popular Dominicano needed a solution that did not negatively affect any production process and could run without the additional equipment and people the other solution required.
Deployment
Banco Popular Dominicano required robust database auditing and protection as critical business requirements and on a limited budget. The solution had to be deployed at the right cost, was efficient to run over time, and did not impact production database performance. In addition, the solution needed to enhance existing native database security in a cost-effective way when it entered production and throughout the course of its useful life.
The company evaluated Imperva SecureSphere (Data Activity Monitoring), which continuously monitors data and account activity across your entire data estate. It carried out validation tests with various systems, including a proof of concept and a real-world production pilot. Banco Popular Dominicano ultimately decided to change to Imperva because during the tests it was the most efficient and cost-effective solution – it worked better, was more detailed, faster, and significantly improved productivity.
Results
Multicomputos project management and implementation consultants, working with Banco Popular Dominicano’s internal security team, had the Imperva solution up and running in only two weeks from initial consultation, which included planning, QA, and Go-Live.
The transition to Imperva went very well and is meeting all their production goals. Laverde shares “the fact that I was not aware of problems and any complications in the process is a good measure of success. This went into production without people knowing and all of the feedback I received has been positive.”
