March, 2010

In 1974, the year before I graduated from my alma mater, Georgia Southern University, I was sitting in my Economics class and was suddenly startled to hear my professor declare that “Recessions are good.”    He went on to explain by saying that when the economy is growing, the focus of business management is generally toward revenue and profit growth.  However, during times of economic difficulties, the focus tends to turn toward examining existing business processes on a much more granular level, because businesses are forced to consider the need to prioritize and maximize efficiencies wherever possible.

I am happy to say that 2010 marks my 35 year of having the pleasure of helping financial institutions, like yours, achieve its goals.  There have been many ups and downs over the years, but 2009 will remain infamous as the worst period for the financial services sector that I can ever remember.  And while the current year will also be a time of difficult maneuvering, my sense is that there is currently a heightened level of awareness, priority setting, and focus on the core beliefs of the financial institutions that will, if nothing else, enhance your ability to execute plans and successfully achieve 12-month goals.

Gladiator Technology’s success in our particular segment of this market, information security and regulatory compliance, continues to grow steadily.  With the current escalating scope of potential types of fraud and threats, coupled with the various regulatory agencies’ ever-increasing expectations of managing risk effectively, the need for our company’s expertise and services has never been greater.

Over the last year we have continued to broaden our list of 24x7x365 security monitoring and patch management offerings.  Gladiator has added intrusion prevention monitoring for Windows 2008 and 64-bit capability for monitoring Windows 2003.  Within the next couple of months, we plan to begin rolling out a new monitoring product that will enable us to receive and respond to event log activity on Windows 2008 systems.  Finally, we are in the process of adding some new devices to the growing list of supported security appliances.

Banks and credit unions that utilize the Jack Henry & Associates’ core software solutions also have the additional option of receiving real-time security alerts and monitoring from Gladiator’s new Enterprise Security Monitoring (ESM) layer.  JHA developers have written and updated the core software systems with code that enables these systems to immediately capture and send a large list of potentially fraudulent or unauthorized transactions to our redundant Gladiator Security Operations Centers based on employee use of the core software and host systems.  Historically, the vast majority of core systems (JHA included) have only provided this type of information in reports the day after batch processing runs have been completed.  However, there are a significant number of potentially spurious transactions or requests that are best to investigate immediately to maximize your information security risk management.

Gladiator’s customer satisfaction ratings have been strong and continue to rise as we have added new trained security analysts, re-engineered some of our customer-facing procedures for tier 1-3 support call processing, and effectively evaluated our performance metrics in a proactive manner.  Additionally, our high touch account management relationships with each of our customers has been very instrumental in helping each financial institution stay in tune with fast-changing regulatory expectations.  We try to help facilitate the growth of your internal level of information security expertise by keeping you aware of the latest trends, interactively reviewing reports, and improving escalation paths to provide the right information to the proper person in an easy-to-understand format that helps expedite more informed decisions.

The outlook for the security arena is that information security attack methodologies will continue to evolve quickly in ever-changing vectors.  Aite Group, a leading financial services industry research group, has once again ranked Information Security as a leading market segment for financial institutions in 2010.  I truly believe that financial institutions will be more secure if they partner with a Managed Services Security Provider that can provide an independent set of eyes to effectively assist them in protecting their institutions and customers. 

Sincerely,

Danny Johnston, Group President