I'm Tanya Gill I work at Bankwest of Kansas. We're a predominantly Egg bank in rural northwest Kansas I've been working as a network administrator for several years now and I also work in operations and compliance.
GFI was one of the companies that we researched probably about six years ago and I actually did some Google research to find various companies that could do what we needed for our security logs and by comparing the various products they seem to be the best fit for our company. We needed a product like GFI EventsManager because we needed to find a way to compile the data from all of our security logs. We have a massive amount of data that you have to go through each day and this consolidates that information and makes it easier to focus on any events that might be happening on the network.
The primary benefits of using this tool is the savings in time that it took from all the various staff members that are reviewing logs, so that in itself is a huge savings. It's also in our opinion, cost savings to be proactive instead of reactive to new events. The technical benefits for using EventsManager is consolidating those data files so that we can run reports and see what's exactly going on in our network. A specific situation where we have found some benefit with GFI EventsManager is a lot of the IP addresses that we can monitor coming into our network, the type of granular activity that it can track allows us to set parameters on our network to either allow or not allow those particular addresses. In the past, before we had the software to consolidate this information, we were actually having to look at each individual devices security logs and try to sort out anything that may be of concern. It was a task that was nearly impossible to do.
Today the process for reviewing the logs has become just a small simple task each day. We've actually got the software configured so that it can filter any of the noise or events as we call them that we don't really need to be monitoring each day. So one person now can just have that as part of their morning routine on reviewing the logs, they can run reports, filter of anything they need to see and if there is something, than we can address it right away.
GFI EventsManager helps us with our compliance and regulation requirements because the type of activity again that we are seeing, regulators require us to monitor and archive the history from our security logs. We're also required to review those that address any usual activity, and well, the big things with the bank is safeguarding our customer information; and that is key to any financial institution as well as other businesses. If somebody was considering GFI and asked my opinion of their service and their product, I would highly recommend them.
The product has went far above what I actually expected it to do and again, for a small community bank we have to watch our costs in every area and it's been a very beneficial product for that price.
