Stillwater National Bank and Trust Co., a unit of Southwest Bancorp Inc. in Stillwater, Okla., said it used software from TriGeo Network Security Inc. to make sure there was no danger in linking its network with that of Bank of Kansas, which it bought last month.
TriGeo's software provides data on network activity and access permissions. For the acquisition, "it gave us the ability to analyze their network a bit before incorporating it into ours," Laura Briscoe, the network security administrator for Stillwater National Bank, said in an interview last week.
"It gave us more information," she said. "It gave us a higher comfort level."
Though there was nothing problematic with Bank of Kansas' technology, which had its own antivirus software, firewalls, and access controls, it moved some data in ways that Stillwater's systems generally did not permit, Ms. Briscoe said. These practices would have been blocked by Stillwater's system, potentially creating problems, if the company had not addressed the technological gaps before merging the networks, Ms. Briscoe said.
"Once we put them on our network, we would have seen that kind of traffic … [and] we would have been blocking it when we didn't need to be blocking it," she said. TriGeo's software gave Stillwater the ability to address that "before the fact."
