Republic Bank of Chicago Gains Continuous Visibility Into Their Security Posture with Prelude

Facing limited insight into its security posture and relying on otherwise manual, point-in-time assessments, the bank adopted Prelude to continuously monitor its environment and ensure that critical security tools are deployed and performing as expected.

The visibility challenge

When Mason Janzen stepped into the role of Information Security Officer for Republic Bank, he inherited a common but critical challenge: a lack of visibility into the bank’s overall security posture. There wasn’t a way to easily determine which existing safeguards like EDR or security policies were fully active.

“It’s a huge pain when you’re attempting to compare lists and try to find which devices are missing from which tools,” said Mason. “Before Prelude, I was doing this sort of work in spreadsheets. It’s miserable.” 

Mason needed a more efficient, reliable way to understand the state of security across Republic’s environment including which controls were applied to which devices and what policies each device was running. The solution couldn’t depend on those static reports or error-prone spreadsheets.

The impact of Prelude

Enter: a free trial of Prelude’s continuous control monitoring platform. Republic Bank leveraged their trial of Prelude to quickly understand the state of their current posture. Republic was able to quickly connect their tools like MDM, EDR, and identity management platforms, where Prelude automatically deduplicated and normalized the data to create an aggregate inventory of Republic’s known devices, users, and email inboxes. Within minutes, Mason was able to surface insights like devices missing EDR or lacking expected policy protections. 

With policies and control configuration being a top priority for Republic, Prelude provided the timely visibility Mason was looking for and couldn’t achieve without investing significant time and leaping between consoles. 

“Clicking through Azure, you can stumble through 10,000 configs and many are not in areas that security people would ordinarily go to,” said Mason.

“The visibility that Prelude provides makes it enormously easy to find the ones that are relevant without wasting time.”

Prelude’s monitoring now underpins how the bank verifies the coverage and effectiveness of its defenses, giving Mason and his team continuous assurance that the controls protecting customers and data are performing as expected.

Looking ahead

Republic Bank plans to expand its use of Prelude as it continues onboarding new tools and strengthening its security posture. The bank intends to continue to integrate new tools and use Prelude’s data to drive automated alerts and tickets when gaps or misconfigurations appear—making it a fully embedded part of its posture management strategy.

“Prelude has been a huge visibility tool for us, including policies I didn’t even know were a problem, and we expect it to only become infinitely more helpful as we add more tools. It’s been a massive time savings for us.”