Case Study: Continental Stock
Using Managed Cloud Operations to Continuously Improve a Security Posture
Summary
Continental Stock Transfer & Trust Company (Continental Stock) has been in business for over 50 years and is one of the top five largest transfer agents in the United States. Their systems are required to be highly secure and available to service their growing customer base. Continental Stock is committed to continually improving their existing solutions.
PHASE 1 | Ignite
One such initiative was increasing their security posture by hardening their application servers to meet the Center for Internet Security (CIS) basic standards. As a RightBrain Networks’ Managed Cloud Operations client their environments are under constant management and support. To meet Continental Stock’s new requirements, RightBrain utilized Amazon Inspector to discover security hardening improvements that could be made.
PHASE 2 | Innovate
RightBrain’s engineers scripted out remediation for the improvements suggested for the Amazon Linux Operating System. The scripting then was applied to all Continental Stock’s application servers. Amazon Inspector was then configured to run on a schedule to continually assess the servers in the environments. The findings of these scheduled runs trigger a Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic that then executes an AWS Lambda with the Inspector findings. The Lambda evaluates the finding if a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is found on the server, the Lambda calls AWS Systems Manager (SSM) to run a security update on the server. The result of the findings is then sent to the RightBrain Cloud Operations Management team.
Outcome
Continental Stock Transfer & Trust Company servers and cloud environments are now hardened and continually improved on for security. This has led to faster security remediations. Additionally, the environment has a higher level of integrity and a substantially stronger audit trail of system level changes resulting in shorter audit times.
Ingredients
AWS
Third Party
Managed Cloud Operations
Company Profile
Continental Stock Transfer & Trust is the 4th largest stock transfer agent in North America, handling more than 1,100 public & private issues and aggregating more than 2 million shareholders. For 53 years the Company has delivered to its clients reliability, stability and premier service at an exceptional price. Continental offers a wide array of services, including public and private offering administration, issuance and transfer of shares, management of restricted transfers and option exercises, maintenance of shareholder stock ledgers, including cost basis history, dividend disbursement and investment plan services, as well as corporate event administration and escrow services. In addition, the Company has a dominant position in the Special Purpose Acquisition Company “SPAC” / IPO business and has been routinely recognized as the leading North American Transfer Agent, delivering exceptional services and unmatched value to its customers.
Challenges
Continental Stock wanted to deploy the ensure a continuous improvement of their security posture by hardening their cloud environments