Bolstering Security and Validating Compliance in Financial Services

Last summer, I wrote about the value of network traffic as a source of truth and the growing role that derived metadata plays as organizations adopt AI and modern analytics. In highly regulated sectors such as financial services, visibility is critical because security and privacy frameworks, including PCI and the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) in the European Union, govern every transaction, interaction, and backend process. This is a challenging and complex endeavor, especially when integrating hybrid cloud workloads with legacy systems that reside in private data centers.

Risk is introduced by this mixed and disaggregated architecture. Internal apps, partner platforms, SaaS providers, and customer-facing systems all exchange traffic — and a substantial portion of it passes through encrypted channels. Sensitive data is protected by encryption, but security personnel have less visibility. As a result, blind spots emerge, and security professionals are increasingly turning to network-derived telemetry as an essential source of truth rather than relying solely on application instrumentation or endpoint logs.

In this follow-up article, I will examine the challenges related to security and compliance within the financial services industry and what Gigamon is doing to solve them.

Complexity Creates Critical Visibility Gaps

Enterprise cybersecurity tools often struggle to provide the deep, multi-layered visibility required to meet modern financial services regulatory requirements. The result is fragmented visibility across encrypted traffic, East-West (lateral) communications, and hybrid cloud environments. These networks are vast and complex, tying data centers, campuses, and branches together through long-haul fiber and cloud-managed networking services. Limited visibility makes it extremely difficult to ensure the protection of sensitive customer and transactional data, as well as maintain PCI and other standards compliance and governance.

One of the biggest pitfalls that financial institutions must address is this visibility gap. Security solutions are highly specialized, but they frequently rely on logs or application instrumentation, which provides only a limited view of a networked infrastructure estate. Furthermore, threats in these environments do not necessarily come from obvious points of entry. Attackers are increasingly using encrypted communication channels and lateral movement to evade detection. Often, security teams work with an insufficient amount of information without network-level visibility.

Application metadata intelligence becomes crucial in this situation. The consistent, infrastructure-level representation of activity across environments provided by metadata extracted from real-time network traffic is powerful. Network telemetry captures real-time communication patterns between systems, in contrast to standard logs, which rely on configuration and application behavior. That distinction matters in financial environments, where compliance and forensic accountability require verifiable evidence of network activity.

This is where the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline has enormous potential to address what financial services companies demand to bolster security and validate compliance. With this context set, let’s examine three fundamental business issues and the potential outcomes — risk management and security posture, compliance and audit readiness, and operational efficiency and performance.

Risk Management and Security Posture

In financial services, maintaining an effective security posture depends on complete visibility into encrypted, East-West, and hybrid cloud traffic. Without network context, “low and slow” threats can hide in encrypted sessions and move laterally, reducing detection confidence and slowing investigations. Gigamon shines in this regard, delivering network-derived telemetry, including packets, flows, and metadata to the tools security teams already rely on, bringing critical network context to existing logs and MELT data. This helps security teams quickly correlate activity using network context and traditional telemetry. The benefits are dramatically improved detection fidelity, accelerated triage and remediation, and reduced false positives. The resulting value is significant, including the protection of assets and sensitive financial data, as well as more granular visibility that supports stronger risk management and a more robust security posture.

Consequently, network-derived telemetry enables security teams to observe how systems communicate during normal operations and during anomalies. Patterns in metadata can quickly reveal suspicious behaviors long before traditional alerts appear. By employing this methodology, proactive security is strengthened, and the dwell time attackers need to establish persistence within networks is reduced dramatically.

Compliance and Audit Readiness

Financial institutions must prove compliance and control effectiveness continuously, not just at audit time. Unfortunately, encryption and architectural complexity can limit inspection, create gaps in control coverage, and make evidence collection a manual and time-consuming effort. The good news is that Gigamon provides network-derived telemetry across hybrid traffic and adds an independent layer of network visibility that complements logs and MELT data. With centralized, governed decryption and selective delivery of packets, flows, and metadata to existing tools, teams can validate controls, improve audit readiness, and reduce preparation burden. According to Gigamon, in many deployments, organizations report reductions in audit preparation time by up to 50 percent. This approach also enables full inspection of encrypted traffic without degrading network performance.

From a compliance perspective, demonstrating the effectiveness of control is frequently just as important as putting it into practice. There is growing pressure on financial services organizations to demonstrate that security measures function uniformly in all circumstances. Traditional compliance activities include system checks, log reviews, and manual evidence collection. These methods often lead to costly time consumption and friction that result in incremental operational costs.

To address these challenges, application metadata intelligence introduces a more continuous model of compliance validation. When network telemetry feeds observability and security platforms, teams gain real-time visibility into how policies operate across infrastructure. This capability facilitates the early detection of visibility gaps and expedites the preparation of evidence in response to regulatory requests.

Operational Efficiency and Performance

Across hybrid cloud environments, application performance and operational resilience require clear visibility into how network traffic moves between users, applications, and infrastructure. Tool sprawl and limited insight into East-West traffic can slow troubleshooting, fragment operational efficiency, and surface issues only after customer impact. In contrast, Gigamon delivers network-derived telemetry across encrypted and hybrid traffic while adding critical network context to MELT data to address these issues. In selectively filtering, enriching, and routing packets, flows, and metadata to existing observability tools, teams can isolate issues faster, reduce MTTR, and improve service reliability. This improves the effectiveness of existing tools and can significantly lower monitoring and tooling costs.

Operational resilience holds particular importance in the financial services industry. Customers expect payment services, banking platforms, and digital transactions to work without interruption. Even small performance issues can cascade into widespread service disruptions. Consequently, deeper visibility into application behavior across networks allows operations teams to diagnose issues earlier and resolve them faster.

Another benefit emerges in the form of tool optimization. Many enterprises deploy a myriad of monitoring and security tools that collect and analyze data. Network-derived telemetry can feed these platforms more efficiently by filtering and enriching traffic before it reaches these tools. This approach delivers tremendous value by improving signal quality while reducing unnecessary and latency-sensitive data ingestion.

Corpay Leans into the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline

I frequently hear the same challenges when I speak with leaders in the financial services industry. Uncertainty is a result of visibility gaps, and organizations can realize higher degrees of confidence in operational performance and security posture when unlocking the power of network telemetry across hybrid infrastructure deployments.

Corpay is a great case in point. As it expanded its hybrid multi-cloud environment, the company needed deeper network visibility to strengthen security operations and support evolving compliance requirements. Advanced Gigamon capabilities, including Application Metadata Intelligence (AMI), offer richer network-derived telemetry that helps Corpay gain greater operational insight across its distributed infrastructure, providing improved understanding of traffic and potential threats.

Final Thoughts

In highly regulated industries like financial services, balancing security, compliance, and operational performance is becoming increasingly difficult as encrypted networks grow more distributed. Deeper visibility into network activity is no longer optional. By delivering high-fidelity, network-derived telemetry and adding context to existing MELT data, Gigamon is helping financial institutions reduce risk, strengthen security posture, and maintain continuous compliance across complex on-premises and hybrid cloud environments.

Click here for more information on how Gigamon is supporting financial services.

CONTINUE THE DISCUSSION

People are talking about this in the Gigamon Community’s Security group.