Prodata Systems and Exabeam guarantee a safe environment for P&V Group

The cooperative insurance group P&V Group has been active on the Belgian market for over 100 years. It distributes its insurance solutions through a network of agents and brokers under various brand names, such as Vivium, Actel, Arces, and P&V Insurance. The group has around 1,700 employees. The constant underlying idea of solidarity with both the insured and society is still reflected today in the group's ambitions, namely to work together with clients on better insurance products that are tailored to the needs of private and independent clients, as well as companies and institutions. 

The Challenge

The world is rapidly digitising, and so is the insurance sector. Whereas in the past, contact with clients was mainly through agents or brokers, today’s consumers increasingly want to communicate directly with their insurers. This means that paper has to make way for ones and noughts. Digitisation also means many additional possibilities to access the systems.

“Offering certain services and contact channels via web portals or mobile apps means that not only our own clients can access them, but also people with malicious intent,” says Christoph Cauwe, IT Team Leader at P&V Group. 

Moreover, there is also the issue of GDPR in Europe, which imposes stringent regulations on organisations and companies when it comes to data protection. This is a particular challenge in the insurance sector, where a lot of confidential data is circulating.  Christoph: “It means that security is crucial to be able to exchange and manage data very securely.”

The Criteria 

During this digital transition, P&V Group is using various applications to guarantee the security of the data and connections with its clients. “It is essential that we can combine and match up the information from all these different sources. This also means that we want to collect all the logs from those devices in one central location where we can monitor and match the information,” says Christoph Cauwe. So, we did not yet have a SIEM solution, but it became essential to be able to deal with the massive flow of security-relevant logs that have to be analysed. 

Although security was P&V Group’ top priority, the solution also had to be affordable. 

The Solution 

We found that Exabeam had the solution for us. It met all of the P&V Group’s criteria by using the more traditional SIEM systems in combination with SOC services. This security solution integrates seamlessly with the products that P&V Group is already using. Christoph Cauwe: “We chose Exabeam because this very modern solution can handle Artificial Intelligence.” Exabeam’s solution provides automated analysis and correlation of potential threats, requiring very little team interaction.

Prodata Systems was an essential link in the entire project. As the IT integrators, they were involved right from the very start of the project. We found not only their expertise and professionalism to be significant assets, but we were also pleasantly surprised by their support (before and after) and their specialists’ very smooth implementation of Exabeam.

The Advantages

The automation is one of the main advantages. “The analysis, correlation, and reporting have all been automated to ensure that with a limited team of specialists, we can still guarantee a high level of security and act proactively on security notices.”

Another asset is the integration with existing solutions. P&V Group is dealing with the deployment of various security devices. The logs from these are now also collected in the new Exabeam environment, providing the IT team with even more information than before. “This gives us very valuable reports with clear risk scores and speedy results. We now have insight into user behaviour, which we never had previously. Exabeam allows us to protect our data with limited human interaction,” says Christoph Cauwe.

The Future 

As there is no going back when it comes to digitisation, and further services will be digitised in the future, even more will be expected from security. Christoph Cauwe: “Security is quite a complex issue. In today’s world with a shortage of security experts, automation is essential. Exabeam makes it possible to simplify many things to be able to collect and correlate a large amount of data with a minimal group and act on it quickly and correctly. I know of very few solutions that will handle data in this way.”