Russian chain Rive Gauche selects IBM for security makeover

Armonk, N.Y. IBM announced that Rive Gauche, a chain of perfume and cosmetics stores in Russia, has implemented security solutions from IBM to better protect its IT infrastructure and help prevent customers’ financial data from being compromised.

Rive Gauche is a rapidly growing company with thousands of workstations and servers throughout its 140 stores in Russia. By rolling out IBM’s security solutions to its St. Petersburg headquarters and branches, Rive Gauche is transforming its IT infrastructure into one that is secure by design, enabling the retail chain to stay ahead of an increasingly sophisticated and diverse threat environment, according to IBM.

“As we’ve expanded our network of retail stores, a key concern for Rive Gauche has been to safeguard our customers’ personally identifiable information data and protect the IT systems in our headquarters, local offices, stores and warehouses from all manner of threats,” said Alexey Smolin, head of Information Security Department, Rive Gauche. “With IBM, we found a proactive approach that helps us not only remediate based on specific attacks, but gives us a clear view into suspicious activity well before it becomes a problem.”

IBM’s integrated security solution allows Rive Gauche to detect threats, block unidentified, illegal activities across the company’s gateways, networks, servers and desktops, and provides a transparent view of policy violations in a single, comprehensive control system. IBM software helps set security policies that can escalate important events by generating urgent emails or can de-emphasize less important events. With such safeguards in effect, Rive Gauche aims to prevent security breaches, rather than having to respond after they occur.

“Rive Gauche is tapping IBM Security Solutions for more than just viruses and attacks -- it’s building a system that is secure by design,” said Steve Robinson, general manager of IBM Security Solutions. “At its core, Rive Gauche is setting a proactive security policy with IBM solutions to better safeguard its clients and corporate information.”

Since implementing the IBM system, Rive Gauche cites an improvement in identifying and resolving security incident investigations. The IBM solution has a built-in auditing tool that shows computer file access and system registry operations. Rive Gauche receives alerts if a system was compromised or if there is attempted access by unauthorized agents.

Rive Gauche is using IBM Security Server Protection, IBM Security Desktop Protection and IBM Security SiteProtector.