Tata Teleservices Secures Enterprise IT Network With TCS, RSA enVision Platform

Tata Teleservices Ltd is one of India’s leading private telecom service providers. The company offers a wide range of telecom solutions to its customers under the Tata Indicom and Tata Docomo brands, and uses the latest GSM and CSDMA technologies for its wireless network. TTSL along with Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) Ltd serves more than 60 million customers in more than 320,000 towns across 23 areas in the country.

Business Challenge

Tata Teleservices has rapidly developed to become one of India’s leading telecom operators. This has been achieved by acquiring companies in this sector and broadening its product portfolio to include value-added offerings such as Wimax, broadband and pay-as-you-go. The company understood that it needed a centralised security management system for the enterprise. Past mergers, subsidiaries and acquisitions, a broadening services portfolio and increasing geographical reach were some of the factors driving this. In turn, these brought other issues to the forefront such as network access for suppliers and distributors, multi-level outsourcing and a distributed infrastructure.

For the company to press ahead with its growth plans and introduce a centralised security management system, it needed to resolve these issues. From a technology perspective, challenges revolved around a complex IT infrastructure, geographical spread of users and high volumes of data. Specifically, this meant that it needed to provide an insight into all network components to proactively monitor their availability, enable centralised monitoring and incident logging, and process multiple queries on a high volume log database. It also needed to monitor system performance to enable efficient log monitoring and proactive monitoring of suspicious events online**.**

Solution

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a sister company of Tata Teleservices, was charged with developing a centralised management system. TCS followed the Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) approach for deploying a SOC at Tata Teleservices. This helped reduce the risks involved in the SOC deployment, enabled a phased rollout and provided better visibility into Tata Teleservices’ complex infrastructure.

The implementation of the SOC was carried out in accordance with guidelines from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. At the centre of the SOC is RSA enVision, from RSA, the Security Division of EMC. TCS had previously compared RSA enVision with similar SIEM products and concluded that it offered the greatest flexibility, ease-of-integration and robust reliability.

RSA enVision is a 3-in-1 platform capable of collecting and analysing large amounts of data in real-time, from any event source and in computing environments of any size. It is easily scalable and eliminates the need for filtering or to deploy agents. It simplifies compliance and enhances security through real-time notification of high-risk events and the delivery of actionable intelligence.

TCS also leveraged the standard reports within RSA enVision to deliver customised reports for different audiences and requirements. These include management reports for senior management, compliance reports for auditors, security reports for information security management and technical reports for network administrators, systems administrators, helpdesk and so on.

Benefits

TCS’s understanding of RSA enVision and expertise helped to deliver a smooth implementation and deliver some important features and benefits for Tata Teleservices. This included design and implementation of the RSA enVision architecture to facilitate log collection from a myriad of devices, across a network geography that extended across the length and breadth of India. For example, the distributed network had multiple gateways to the internet, which needed to be monitored. Approximately 6,500 event sources are being monitored each second.

TCS also configured correlation rules within RSA enVision to receive genuine alerts and eliminate false positives, which also ensured an effective and proactive monitoring process. The use of the RSA enVision alerts module provided an in-depth understanding of the alerts generated by various devices and ensured that appropriate action could be taken for each alert. A comprehensive knowledge base, which contains details of incidents, root causes and solutions is also utilised whenever an incident is raised, ensuring quicker resolution of incidents. TCS also developed a centralised portal, based on Microsoft SharePoint, to provide a repository and workflow process for managing reports generated by RSA enVision and for posting schedules, announcements, documents, the knowledge-base and more.

Thanks to TCS expertise and the RSA functionality, Tata Teleservices now has a comprehensive SIEM solution that addresses both the business and technical challenges.