NETAND
Mitigating Security Risks For Organizations' IT Infrastructure

As business processes continue to be digitized rapidly, IT environments are becoming more distributed and dynamic with each passing day. With growing IT infrastructure, security risks— ransomware, malware attacks—are also spiraling at an unprecedented rate. Even a small security hiccup can wreak havoc, hampering the credibility of the concerned organization and putting their customers’ data in peril. The biggest risk to the digital systems is insider threat. Insider threats pose major risks for organization as they are threats that involve people who have insider knowledge about the organization’s resources such as facilities, IT equipment, network information and computer systems as well as access to these resources. Another one of the eminent loopholes through which cybercriminals breach an organization’s systems is identity thefts and unauthorized access. Frequently, such cyber theft can be attributed to organizations’ legacy security protocols that still rely heavily on manual processes. Rising to the occasion is the Korean company, NETAND with innovative network security solutions for safer and efficient system management and protecting organizations’ complex IT infrastructure.

The Genesis

Ho Chul Shin, NETAND’s CEO, had previously worked as a system engineer for a different company, and he realized that they experienced various types of system failures in the field. Most of them were due to human errors, and it caused inconveniences and unwarranted risks for system administrators. Users often shared and used the manager account or accessed individual infrastructure equipment by entering their ID and password in the system. They sometimes used different passwords or IDs for the same person causing frequent mishaps, and, in the event of such a failure, it became tedious to identify who was responsible and recover from the failure. There were also security concerns as users with access to the main system could easily obtain all the documents and files on different servers which needed to be limited. Additionally, there were problems such as manually changing policies, including password policies, passwords, and ID information. This inefficiency resulted in several time-consuming sessions for the administrators who had to put in much effort to track the human errors and security problems.

NETAND was born to battle these issues, and the company has proved its mettle by acquiring many loyal customers and becoming one of the market leaders in South Korea since its inception.

HIWARE – Next Gen Integrated Identity and Access Management

The company’s HIWARE Identity Management (IM) solution features an automated and integrated approach to managing all user accounts scattered across systems (on-premises or cloud). This enables the IM solution to sync and consolidate all identity types in real-time, without lags in status updates that cyber attackers are always ready to pounce on. The HIWARE IM solution also automates the account and password management process to increase efficiency.

However, the hassle with identity management is incorporating it with the various systems and digital infrastructures that clients have in place. From a technical aspect, it is important to incorporate an IM solution with all the other solutions which may cause usability problems. But NETAND’s identity management is configured to incorporate the IM solution while maintaining the various processes of its clients as much as possible. “The flexibility of our solution entails the basic philosophy of NETAND’s solutions,” adds Shin.

NETAND also provides Privileged Access Management (PAM) that enables end-to-end management and supervision of users by controlling all accesses and operations of clients’ IT infrastructure such as networks and servers, monitoring work details in real-time, and saving log records. “We not only provide identity management but also deliver access management solutions in one single UI to eliminate security concerns of our clients,” states Shin

Additionally, NETAND also renders IM and PAM solutions for clients’ DBMS. The solution collects the clients’ accounts scattered across DBMS and automatically manages account life cycles and passwords, from the point of creation to deletion, in accordance with clients’ security management policies. NETAND’s unified and automated identity management features streamline clients’ DBMS accounts management, allowing them to save time and costs significantly.

On the other hand, NETAND’s PAM for DBMS grants access to personal information databases and provides authorization data separately to each user to prevent leaks of personal information and confidential documents.

“Our solutions provide impenetrable security to clients’ systems while supporting an unlimited number of devices and users without any lag or downtime,” informs Shin. Most importantly, NETAND provides one of the fastest deployment times for its solutions, enabling clients to be up and running in no time. The firm ensures to provide valuable maintenance options and, whenever a client needs an additional function, NETAND grants it and keeps upgrading its solution to secure its flexibility. The company has instituted a separate team that constantly analyzes its clients’ requests and processes in the product. “Even if we don’t get a request, we keep analyzing how our clients’ system works with our solution,” adds Shin. This upfront approach has enabled NETAND to achieve up to 65 percent share of the identity management market which global vendors in South Korea majorly occupy.

A Robust Track Record

“We can work with any other program or any additional security solution that clients are already using because our NETAND works as a proxy,” asserts Shin. For instance, the HIWARE solution can be integrated with the HR systems, and it can automatically follow who has stopped working or retired at a company and does not have access to the system. This means that if an employee user quits their job, the solution can automatically track it and block their access to the system, which surely corroborates security to enterprises. “One of the biggest risks that we face today in cybersecurity is finding out who should not have access to your system and who previously had access, but they should not anymore,” adds Shin.

Although the company has helped several organizations strengthen their security periphery with its innovative solutions, an instance that truly captures the potential of NETAND’s solutions is the success story of one of the largest telecommunication and digital platform companies in Korea. The client developed privileged access management solutions based on VPN, which had critical problems. With more than 40,000 users and 560,000 multivendor system devices spread across Korea, the telecom company was facing an issue of slow session speed. Due to the lag in session speed, the number of sessions had been limited, making it difficult to increase the number of users accessing the solution. The client’s solution also included many restrictions on applying the DAC (Discretionary Access Control), making it inflexible to grant per-user permissions. After long consideration, the telecom company identified a few vendors to combat this issue and eventually chose HIWARE.

Our solutions provide impenetrable security to clients’ systems as well as support unlimited number of devices and users without any lag or downtime

NETAND solved the problem of slow speed by increasing number of inheritance steps. Firstly, to resolve the increased number of equipment and users, NETAND managed to separate the product’s structure into manager servers and relay servers. Then the relay servers were changed to be parallel to address the speed and the number of sessions. NETAND decided to apply both MAC and DAC concepts to Privileged Access Management to facilitate the assignment of different roles to different users. NETAND added the concept of customer’s organization-specific inheritance to the user’s permissions, redesigning it to make it easier for the customer to set tiered organization-specific permissions. To this end, NETAND’s HIWARE PAM solution delivered enhanced scalability, responsiveness of the telecom’s systems, while increasing stability for unbreachable security for their network. “The several automated features of our HIWARE solution allowed our client to offer robust security to their users, as well as helped them save administrators’ precious time,” extols Shin.

What Lies Ahead

Established in 2007, NETAND has steadily climbed the ladders of success with its innovative products and has won several awards and accolades. The firm’s philosophy of flexibility is leading it to a much better future when NETAND further expands in other foreign markets. “What if someone writes their ID and password on paper offline and how do we block it from happening. Just as simple as that but there are many other scenarios where human error leads to a very costly mistake,” inquires Shin. Henceforth, NETAND has advanced authentication functions to detect any unauthorized access to the clients’ system and prevent any untoward incidents.