A fast-moving risk environment can be a huge obstacle to maintaining customer trust. But having the right visibility and insights can ensure that your business stays protected, and your business-critical applications run smoothly.

The exponential pace of new technologies—including generative AI and open banking—present both opportunities and unknown risks that financial institutions have not yet faced. The increase in technology partners and the ever-changing attack surface can expose your infrastructure to new vulnerabilities and threats. Staying on top of all the assets you manage as well as those you don’t, and how those assets communicate with one another, is an ongoing effort that needs to be accomplished in real time and at scale.

From legacy systems to applications in the cloud, and all the transactions and sensitive data in between—your infrastructure is vast and dynamic. The challenge is identifying risks and resolving issues before they impact the business, all while making the most of your team’s talent.

NIST SP 800-207 describes a zero trust architecture, providing tenets and requirements for the enterprise. One key requirement is that the enterprise observe all network traffic. Analysts have stated: “There can be no Zero Trust without visibility into what’s happening inside networks.” True visibility requires examining actual payloads, not just the contextual information in packet headers. For financial institutions, this visibility and examination needs to happen at tremendous speed and scale.

In financial services, complex business applications can comprise many different components: on-premises and in the cloud, off-the-shelf and custom, first-party and third-party. Though the application delivery chain may start with code, it can span application servers, backend databases, shared services, authentication services, DNS, message queuing, thin clients, and maybe even a mainframe. For the application to perform well, all of these must work together in synchronicity, talking to each other across the network.