Case Study: International Financial Services Organization achieves secure open access to sensitive M&A data and regulatory compliance with Fortra's Digital Guardian

International Financial Services Organization - Customer Case Study

A multi-billion-dollar global financial services firm with more than 200,000 employees and businesses across commercial banking, wealth management, and investment banking faced a failed SEC audit and a difficult trade-off: maintain its culture of open access while preventing exposure of highly confidential M&A deal data. The investment banking teams needed unfettered access to deal information, privileged administrators had to perform server maintenance without seeing or moving sensitive files, and the firm required notifications (not blocking) to enable rapid incident response.

Fortra’s Digital Guardian implemented context-based, automated data discovery and metadata tagging that persists to derivative documents, allowing policy-driven access by deal rather than by file-share. The solution let privileged users maintain systems without accessing restricted content, monitored and alerted on suspicious activity in real time, and automated classification and enforcement—preserving open access while improving security, boosting productivity, and remediating the SEC audit findings.