Global Bank: Accelerating Software Acquisition and Reducing Risk with Spectra Assure

A leading global financial institution selected Spectra Assure™ to strengthen their third-party commercial software risk management program and ensure stringent compliance. With Spectra Assure, they now had visibility into the risk and threats of vendor-supplied software packages, such as tampering, embedded malware, and unexplained behavioral changes. The Spectra Assure SAFE Report not only helped identify those issues, but allowed the company to share the report with their vendors to resolve any issues. This helped meet regulatory standards, reduce operational risks, and improve onboarding of new software.

Identified Software Risks During Acquisition

As with many highly regulated companies, the existing software acquisition process was mostly manual, required lots of paperwork, and often took months to obtain approvals before deployment. However, none of these provided any assessment of the risk or threats with commercial software they were looking to purchase. Additionally, to maintain compliance with various industry and government regulations, much of their software is deployed as virtual machines that are too large to scan effectively with traditional tools.Spectra Assure automates the assessment of commercial software, rapidly deconstructing large, complex software packages and virtual machines before deployment to identify risks and threats in minutes without the need for source code. Spectra Assure summarizes the findings in the form of a SAFE report, which can be securely shared across internal teams and back to software vendors to simplify collaboration on remediation planning. Within weeks of initial testing, several of their software suppliers had addressed significant risks to comply with the bank’s new software risk inspection policies.