What challenges does Harmony SASE address for financial services?
Harmony SASE is designed to help financial services organizations balance three core pressures:
1) Strict compliance and data protection
- Financial institutions must comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA, GDPR, and others.
- They need to prove that customer financial records and other sensitive data are properly protected.
- Harmony SASE supports this by improving visibility into where sensitive data lives, who can access it, and how it is used.
2) Secure, efficient access from anywhere
- Customer data is spread across on‑premises systems, private and public clouds, and SaaS applications.
- Employees in branches, corporate offices, and remote locations all need fast, reliable access to these applications.
- Harmony SASE provides secure connectivity and access control across this distributed environment, helping avoid slowdowns that can hurt customer experience and daily operations.
3) Growing cyber risk and evolving threats
- Financial services was the most attacked sector in 2023, accounting for 27% of ransomware incidents.
- Since 2018, ransomware downtime has cost global financial institutions an estimated $32 billion.
- In addition to ransomware, organizations face supply chain attacks, AI‑enabled phishing, and social engineering.
- Harmony SASE helps reduce the attack surface with unified security policies, Zero Trust access, and continuous device posture checks.
By consolidating networking and security into a single SASE platform, Harmony SASE helps financial institutions simplify operations while improving protection of customer data and supporting regulatory compliance.
How does Harmony SASE support visibility and compliance?
Harmony SASE focuses first on visibility, which is a foundation for compliance in financial services.
Key capabilities include:
1) Single pane-of-glass view
- Provides a unified console to see users, endpoints, groups, policies, recent activity, and overall security posture in one place.
- Visualizes connection points to databases and applications that store customer data, across on‑premises and cloud environments.
2) Holistic logging and monitoring
- Captures detailed logs of user and system activity, including:
- Device posture and health
- Application connections and access
- Policy changes
- Gateway deployments and network events
- These logs help demonstrate who accessed what, when, and from where—key evidence for audits.
3) Real-time understanding of sensitive data access
- Goes beyond basic logging to support a real-time view of where sensitive data resides and who can reach it.
- Helps security and compliance teams verify that access aligns with user roles and regulatory expectations.
4) Integration with existing compliance tooling
- Integrates with SIEM and data platforms such as Splunk, Amazon S3, and Azure Sentinel.
- Enables deeper analysis, correlation, and reporting to support internal risk teams and external auditors.
5) Broad platform coverage
- Supports agent-based and agentless deployment models.
- Works across Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, and Windows, helping ensure consistent visibility regardless of device type.
Together, these capabilities help financial institutions document and demonstrate control over access to customer records, which is central to frameworks like Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA, GDPR, and similar regulations worldwide.
How does Harmony SASE enable secure, user-centric Zero Trust access?
Harmony SASE is built around a user-centric Zero Trust model, with controls that extend from identity to device to network traffic.
Core elements include:
1) Identity-driven access control
- Uses Single Sign-On (SSO) via your Identity Provider (IdP) or any SAML 2.0 solution, including Google, Azure, and Okta.
- Applies the principle of least privilege by defining access policies for users and groups based on their roles.
- Policies can also factor in context such as location, device type, and other attributes.
2) Network segmentation and traffic control
- Enables easy network segmentation by creating granular access policies that cover both cloud and on‑premises resources.
- Uses firewall rules to control traffic between services, users, and network objects, helping reduce the attack surface.
3) Device posture checks
- Enforces specific security configurations and posture requirements before a device connects to the network.
- Continues to check device posture periodically after the connection is established, helping maintain ongoing trust.
4) Additional security controls
- ID and context-based access policy rules.
- Automatic Wi‑Fi security.
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA).
- Encrypted site-to-site gateways to protect data in transit across the network.
5) Performance and user experience
- Delivers up to 2x faster internet security compared to many traditional approaches, helping maintain a local browsing experience.
- Combines on-device and cloud-delivered protections to keep latency low while maintaining strong security and privacy.
- Provides full mesh Zero Trust private access and secure SD‑WAN with:
- Optimized connectivity
- Automated steering for over 10,000 applications
- Seamless link failover for uninterrupted web conferencing and critical apps
6) Simplified deployment and management
- Allows organizations to build a secure corporate network over a private global backbone in less than an hour.
- Managed from a unified console, supported by a global team available 24/7.
For financial services organizations, this approach helps connect employees, BYOD users, and third parties to the resources they need—while reducing the risk of unauthorized access, data breaches, and compliance violations.