In the past two years, while the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc across most sectors, fintech in India blossomed like never before. Globally, India has the highest fintech adoption rate at 87% against a global average of 64%. The incredible growth of the sector led to significant capital inflow and rising investor interest. The sector has raised more than $2 billion in 2021 so far, representing a fourfold increase from $495 million raised in the first five months of 2020. But a dark shadow looms over this bright sector.

Share Market Live

NSE

With a massive shift to hybrid work models, the adoption of cloud services has accelerated. While traditional banks are finding it harder to pivot towards cloud, modernizing network management and security simultaneously – fintech players on the other hand suffer from poor programming or security misconfigurations at the application interface (API) levels. This could provide cybercriminals with greater opportunities to carry out identity theft, fraud, and unauthorized data collection. In fact, in 2020, identity theft accounted for 11.6% of fraud incidents while digital wallet account hacks were at 6.2% in India. In essence, India’s modern IT infrastructure of both fintech companies and traditional banks needs to be revamped. Securing every endpoint is vital and on September 22nd, 2021, researchers reported that Android phone banking customers in India were being targeted by the Drinik banking trojan malware. The malware stole users' personal data and funds using phishing techniques. In late December 2020, two million credit score records from an Indian fintech start-up were found on the dark web. The leaked data contained users’ names, contact details, and loan detail information. An emerging technology called Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) will play a crucial role in changing this.

SASE (pronounced “Sassy”) is the buzzword of 2022 for all CISOs worldwide. First coined by Gartner in 2019, SASE is a new approach to network security where Wide Area Networking (WAN) and network security services like Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) and Zero Trust have converged into a single, cloud-delivered service model. The Zero Trust approach towards cloud is the backbone of any SASE solution. It removes trust assumptions when users, devices and applications connect, regardless of them being inside the perimeter of a private network. By filtering URLs, DNS queries, and other incoming and outgoing network traffic, SASE helps prevent malware-based attacks, such as the Drinik banking trojan malware. With SASE, financial institutions can minimize data breach risks by identifying sensitive data consistently throughout the entire enterprise. With Palo Alto Networks' India multi-cloud location, financial institutions can be a step ahead of attackers by leveraging its Cortex Data Lake. This will allow Indian financial institutions to collect, transform, and integrate their security data to consistently protect it from any attack or harm. No matter where resources are connected from, using cloud infrastructure coupled with the right SASE approach, one can easily and securely have access to apps, the internet, and corporate data.

Simplification of IT infrastructure will become possible with SASE. Fintech companies can minimize the number of security products their IT team has to manage, update, and maintain, and consolidate all their security stack into a single cloud-based network. This can further help financial institutions reduce costs. A study by Forrester found that Palo Alto Networks’ SASE platform - Prisma Access - helped its customers reduce its security stack management effort by 50%. The report also found that customers saved approximately $9.2 million due to a breach risk reduction of 45% with Prisma Access. Furthermore, Palo Alto Networks’ customers benefited from a 247% increase in ROI upon using its SASE platform.

SASE allows networks and security teams to redesign themselves in a holistic manner. Whether the data is in the cloud, at the edge or in transit, SASE based solutions will provide an end-to-end security solution on cloud, with centralized visibility across hybrid landscapes. This will further support administrators with better monitoring and management abilities. SASE is expected to find a place in the security infrastructures of at least 40% of global enterprises by 2024 (up from less than 1% at year-end 2018, as per Gartner). Thus, it is imperative that financial institutions in India start recalibrating their organizations through the SASE lens.

This is a Partnered Post