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Secure SASE for Financial Services
Availability and Performance Are Key to Success
In the digital-first era, customers seek fast and 24/7 access to financial services, whether it is to make deposits, avail loans, claim insurance, make investments, or check balances. To win over these tech-savvy customers, financial services organizations such as banks, credit unions, insurance, and mortgage companies, over the years, have constantly continued to innovate digitally capabilities in ways to help attract customers.
To build brand credibility and a broad customer base often nurtured by human interactions, financial services companies are expanding their network of physical branch offices remote areas to offer more availability to customers without sacrificing performance.
“Powerful forces are reshaping the banking industry. Customer expectations, technological capabilities, regulatory requirements, demographics and economics are together creating an imperative to change. Banks need to get ahead of these challenges and retool to win in the next era. Banks must not only execute on today’s imperatives, but also radically innovate and transform themselves for the future.”
PWC Retail Banking 2020 Report
Protecting Transactions Without Sacrificing Speed
To make applications and data readily accessible for employees across all branches, financial services companies are rapidly moving their workloads to the cloud.
However, extensive cloud usage and increased digital interactions have skyrocketed bandwidth consumption, heavily straining the WAN networks. Legacy WAN networks running on MPLS lines, backhauling traffic to the data center are failing to meet these increased demands, leading to frequent network outages and dipping application performance. Employees and customers trying to access mission-critical applications from HQ data centers, cloud-hosted, and SaaS-delivered sites are forced to deal with delayed access and painfully slow financial transactions.
To operate and secure WAN networks, the financial services companies typically invest in multiple networking and security hardware devices. But this practice has only led to fragmented security, make the whole network more convoluted for companies to effectively manage, monitor, and support new services and new branch deployments. Regulation compliance is yet another challenge—manually configuring and updating disparate security devices to abide by stringent data privacy regulations such as EU’s GDPR and USA’s CCPA and FINRA are a laborious and time-intensive task.
How SASE Enables Transformation
To rise above networking issues, financial services companies are looking for modern networking solutions that offer resilience to readily support changing bandwidth and performance demands, agility to easily deploy and manage new branches while keeping sensitive financial information secure and confidential.
Secure SD-WAN does all this and more. The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure should not be necessary. An SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.
Always Available Network
Secure SD-WAN reduces bandwidth costs by aggregating multiple connections of any type, such as MPLS, broadband, wireless 4G, and LTE. By leveraging all available bandwidth, and automatically adapting to network conditions. Secure SD-WAN directs traffic to the best path at any moment in time. This increases application reliability, and in turn, enhances quality user experience. Secure SD-WAN enables financial services companies to offer more services, support huge traffic volumes, and support micro-branches with telepresence facilities and thus saving significant costs.
Centralized Management and Control
With centralized management and control, Secure SD-WAN dramatically simplifies WAN deployment and monitoring. Using simple, template-driven workflows, it eliminates tedious, error-prone configurations. With zero-touch deployment, the IT team can deploy patches, roll out policy updates, and strictly adhere to regulatory mandates across all branch locations from a single central orchestrator in one-go. Secure SD-WAN also offers deep granular visibility into applications, devices, and users to immediately detect and fix anomalies. With a cloud-based SD-WAN and zero-touch deployment, financial services companies can effortlessly manage their complex networks, quickly propagate new remote offices, and connect directly to cloud services. This is especially helpful during mergers and acquisitions when companies must transition to a new model, integrating multiple branches across both parties.
High Application Performance
Secure SD-WAN architecture embeds application intelligence, enabling deep packet inspection by the network, beyond source and destination. Secure SD-WAN understands the application requirements and the context associated with the applications to deliver fast, reliable, and secure application delivery, regardless of network conditions. The ability to be context aware allows employees and customers to enjoy faster financial transactions, quicker transfers, and downloads of large files (CIFS) and uninterrupted services.
Secure Connectivity
Secure SD-WAN offers integrated end-to-end security. This helps financial services organizations secure data stored in cloud applications and avoid cloud traffic backhauling to the data center, saving substantial bandwidth. Secure SD-WAN ’s segmentation enables IT to securely consolidate disparate physical environments into a single network. In doing so, they can support and secure diverse lines of service, such as IT, guest Wi-Fi, ATMs and mobile insurance agencies that are open to public access with priorities defined for each across a shared infrastructure, while retaining management and control.