Sound Investment: Zacks Investment Research Chooses Corero as its First Line of Defense
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Corero’s First Line of Defense
Tech Stack
- DDoS defense solutions
- Network Security
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Technology Category
- Cybersecurity & Privacy - Network Security
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Cybersecurity
Services
- Cybersecurity Services
About The Customer
Zacks Investment Research is one of the most highly regarded firms in the investment industry. The guiding principle behind Zack’s work is that there must be a good reason for brokerage firms to spend billions of dollars a year on stock research. Obviously, these investment experts know something special that may be indicative of the future direction of stock prices. From day one, Zacks was determined to unlock that secret knowledge and make it available to their clients to help them improve their investment results. They created the Zacks Rank, which is purely mathematical: it relies on math to predict direction of stock’s price. Today, Wall Street continues to use Zacks research, including the Zacks Rank and Zacks Equity Research, which combines the best of quantitative and qualitative analysis. This same professional strength research is now available to individual investors on their website, Zacks.com, and through their other services.
The Challenge
Zacks Investment Research is a unique institution with a very special purpose: To deliver sound investment advice their clients can take to the bank. But that means that Zacks must be free of intrusions. It must protect its site to not only ensure it is available to its users, it must also safeguard its information to maintain strong customer confidence. Voloshin said the DDoS attack identified attempts to penetrate the network. He called it “very sophisticated,” and said it was quite strong in volume. Credit cards, personally identifiable information, and PCI mandates, all require protection as well. Proprietary information as a result of the research needed to be protected including data researched and released to institutional clients.
The Solution
That protection was Corero’s First Line of Defense. It provides protection against DDoS and other malicious content attacks, protects the investment in IT infrastructure and eliminates downtime. Zacks narrowed the choices to three vendors: Corero, NitroSecurity (since purchased by McAfee) and Palo Alto Networks. They looked at strength in terms of effectiveness against DDoS attacks. As in-line perimeter security devices, it was also important that the solution was not complicated to set up and use. The solution had to have a proven track record. Zacks put the three in production systems and compared them to see how each of them responded to various situations. They compared system configurations and how they each behaved under similar conditions. They wanted to see how they could be configured to block things they want to block, and if one solution had greater visibility into what was making it onto the network. They also looked at what was stopped and how it was reported on. “It was essentially a bake-off,” Voloshin said. “We followed some guidelines from each on how to evaluate them best.” Corero won because of its First Line of Defense approach. It was much stronger against DDoS attacks. They also found that Corero’s deeper inspection capabilities performed very well, allowing the IT infrastructure already in place to perform more optimally. It was faster, comprehensive in its inspection and overall protection was quite strong.
Operational Impact
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