Bank BRI mitigates cybercrime and financial risk with Elastic Security

Bank BRI is one of the largest banks in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, providing end-to-end financial solutions to more than 130 million customers. As part of its core mission, the bank has a particular focus on empowering microbusinesses and advancing the financial inclusiveness of the countries it serves.

With such a wide range of customers and partners, Bank BRI has created an extensive network across the region. Its long history within the financial sector also means that it has an array of IT assets and tools across the bank, which consist of legacy systems, cutting-edge solutions, and everything in between. In addition, the company’s tremendous size and heterogeneity have created many unique challenges, including difficulty obtaining complete visibility into all of the bank’s systems. 

As Bank BRI continues to innovate and grow, its attack surface also expands, making the bank more susceptible to cybercrime. With a lack of visibility and growing amounts of data, this became an increasingly apparent problem — especially coupled with rising risk across the Southeast Asia (ASEAN) region stemming from the rapid adoption of digital banking. The team thus set out to find new tools to protect its complex network against new and emerging criminal activity.

Risk and security as a pillar of Bank BRI’s mission

With the rapid growth and mass adoption of digital banking, especially in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic, there was a massive increase in data that Bank BRI needed to monitor. One of the major data use cases was that of security operations; Bank BRI needed a solution that could meet its needs with the surge of logs coming in, such as massive processing needs, ultra-responsive and flexible searching, long retention periods, etc. Without these capabilites, security activities such as log auditing, investigation, and security monitoring would be complex, slow, and burdensome to the bank’s operations. The team knew that they needed to make a change to continuously monitor their vast networks, react quickly to incidents, and reduce overall cyber risk.