Our Customer: BankPlus is one of the most reputable regional banks serving the US Southeast. In 2021, Forbes placed it in the Top 25 ranking of the World’s Best Banks, citing its trustworthiness and high-quality digital services. For more than a century, residents of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana have come to expect retail and commercial banking excellence from BankPlus. With more than $4 billion in total assets and 79 financial centers, BankPlus understands the role best-in-class security plays for its customers.

Shareholders were rightly concerned when the bank’s Chief Technology Officer and Director of Information Technology both announced their retirements. Losing two critical members of the senior security team would expose the bank to unknown security risks.

Even if the organization successfully replaced its security leaders immediately, it would still have to navigate a delicate onboarding and transition period.

BankPlus’ Security Challenges: BankPlus had been leveraging Lumifi’s Managed Detection and Response services, including our legacy ELK Logger, since 2019. More recently, the bank needed expert-level guidance and management for its security operations, threat detection, and SIEM management capabilities. By working with Lumifi, BankPlus successfully managed this transition period while leveraging true 24/7 security visibility into its security operations. Outsourcing core security services to Lumii allowed the financial institution to make better use of its SIEM solution and expand its security capabilities at a fraction of the cost of a single full-time employee. BankPlus had three key issues that they needed to resolve with Lumifi’s MDR service:

• Long-Term Logging Solution
• Custom Tuning for Alarms
• 24×7 Security Operations

Results: The Lumifi Difference After their first engagement, BankPlus immediately saw Lumifi’s value and expertise because their SIEM was finally functioning as it should. By leveraging Lumifi’s expertise, their SIEM was configured correctly, and alarms were now escalating when was truly appropriate, thus providing accurate security visibility into their environment

• True 24×7 security visbility within the BankPlus environment for a franction of the cost of 1 full-time employee
• Saving BankPlus’ exsting SIEM prevented “rip and replace” costs
• An outsourced SOC saved the organization significant time and money, taking the pressure off internal staff

Technology Description:

• MDR

Lumifi has assisted BankPlus in both building and supporting a scalable big-data platform for our log management and cyber visualization needs. This has allowed internal technology and risk teams to place time and resources on other critical areas of the organization.

Lumifi has been a true partner, and a real extension to our team. Their SIEM and Security Operations knowledge has been, and continues to be very impressive. They add value to our team and we look forward in continuing to work with them on current and future projects.

- Todd Stringer | Vice President & Information Security Officer

SOC Cost Analysis: Ultimately there are two paths to achieve a strong Information Security posture. Build it in-house, or outsource it. Both options have their pros and cons. On the following page is a SOC Cost-Benefit Analysis to outsource managed security services or build a security team in-house.