The Next Generation of Community Banking Connections

Banking software providers have delivered some of the most solid and secure WAN connectivity for decades. From the early days of dedicated T1 circuits, to MPLS, VPN and now SD-WAN, the connections between software providers and banks, including Community Banking Connections, have been at the forefront of WAN technology.

They didn’t really have a choice. As the facilitator of financial transactions these connections must adhere to very strict security, compliance and availability requirements.

After completing more than 2000 deployments in the community banking connections space, and learning about the technical challenges of connecting digital banking solutions to core banking systems, we now know what they have always known – The greater the integration of networking and security, the easier it becomes to deploy, secure and manage their solutions.

<SASE enters the chat>

Recently, there has been an industry-wide surge of momentum towards tighter integration of security and networking functions. Driven by a move to the cloud and desire to deliver network security in a more seamless fashion, secure access service edge or SASE (pronounced ‘sassy’) architectures have sought to deliver on the needs of modern application infrastructure.

At its core, SASE converges WAN networking capabilities and remote user access with security such as firewalls, traffic inspection and other services into a single solution.

Bringing all of these elements together and managing as a unified cloud-delivered service provides a blanket of protection over all users, devices, data and applications.

The Fintech SASE Challenge

To maintain their banking customer’s security and compliance requirements fintechs add various security components to their infrastructure. To satisfy their application connectivity requirements they are moving toward software-defined networking solutions. SASE ties all of these things together in a way that allows fintech providers to deliver complete network security services to financial institutions (FI).

Due to their limited budgets and in-house specializations, community FIs in particular will look for fintech providers that can bring these services as a complete package.

Currently, SASE exists as a North Star to security and networking vendors. While many agree that SASE is the future of network security, no single security or networking provider has emerged as having a complete SASE offering… though many are frantically trying to assemble one.

This means that fintech providers will be looking to build their own in-house SASE architectures and leveraging the existing best-of-breed security solutions already in place. This will require networking solutions that are “SASE compatible”.

Trustgrid Enables SASE Architectures

As a platform providing integrated remote access and site to site networking, Trustgrid allows fintech providers to build their own customized SASE solutions and deliver them seamlessly to their banking customers.

These banking focused SASE networks can be created in parallel to existing infrastructure or swapped out as networking hardware experiences normal end-of-life replacement. The flexibility of the platform allows application-to-core banking connections to be delivered as a turnkey service and allows these connections to add new network or security services as needed. The architecture’s centralized management capabilities then allow for all services to be centrally managed and monitored for anomalies that may impact a financial institution’s end users. 

While the banking industry’s move to SASE is only in the second inning, it is a game that everyone is preparing to play and fintech providers will lead. Trustgrid provides the tools for this transition and accelerates the ability for both banks and fintech providers to take advantage of the next generation of banking connections. 

Learn more about SASE architectures