Savant Protection

Connecticut River Bank, N.A. provides an array of commercial and residential loan products from conventional mortgages, land loans, construction loans, jumbo mortgages, VHFA, NHHFA and more. The bank is a nationally chartered commercial bank with eleven offices located along the Connecticut River in New Hampshire and Vermont. The bank currently has total assets of approximately $245 million, and over 100 full-time employees, including 3 IT personnel. In order to protect these far flung employees from the introduction and spread of malware, the bank has turned to the premier whitelisting security vendor in the United States: Savant Protection.

With over 27 years of banking IT and operations experience, Louise Dube, AVP of IT & E-Banking at Connecticut River Bank, knows how to manage and protect a bank infrastructure. As an early adopter and tester of the Savant whitelisting solution, Dube was able to directly affect the features and functionality that the product would take on. She recalls that “the early testing went really well and the Savant team was very receptive to our feedback and suggestions. The product works great!”

In action, Savant provides complete system lock down, while banning the use of unauthorized software. Dube confirms that “we are very pleased by the level of control that we have over our desktops – it really blocks everything that we don’t want running on the machines.” She characterizes the program as a “set and forget” system that “provides a lot of peace of mind by knowing that our network is completely protected.” So-called Zero Day threats are blocked, as well as run of the mill existing malware which keeps IT Departments from worrying about being behind in patching their systems.

In terms of patching and allowing legitimate updates to be installed, Savant handles these scenarios with ease. Dube explains that “we can effortlessly configure the platform to allow Microsoft patches and authorized changes, plus the Savant console allows for pushing out updates directly.” In other words, only unauthorized changes and updates are blocked. According to Dube, “the user interface is quite good – just about anyone can be up and running in a few minutes.” As for technical support, she enthuses that “it is awesome! The Savant team is super helpful.”

While very few organizations would consider running their PCs without an active anti-virus program, this is exactly what Connecticut River Bank is doing. Anti-virus software is considered the mainstay of just about everyone’s first line of desktop defense, but it is an expensive proposition and can have a negative impact on network endpoint performance and reliability. Dube was thrilled to remove AV software from her network and replace it with Savant, which she describes as “anti-virus on steroids.” Importantly, the bank’s internal auditors and the OCC accept Savant as a low cost, low maintenance AV software replacement tool. Dube insists that “Savant is better than AV packages, less expensive and only requires about an hour of maintenance per month.”

Additionally, Savant protects bank employees’ laptops when they are travelling from rogue WiFi hotspots that employees may use. Also as the bank converts to Microsoft servers, Savant will be installed on those machines as well. The bank’s senior management team views Savant as a good investment, while Dube concludes that “using Savant is a no-brainer – we highly recommend them.”