Providing secure SD-WAN connectivity for branches post-pandemic

By Sundar Balasubramanian, Managing Director, Check Point India, and SAARC

In a post-pandemic world, key industries such as Finance and Healthcare are seeing an increase in the number and sophistication of cyber-attacks, ranging from double ransomware to social hacktivism entering the political realm.

Here in India, our Check Point Threat Intelligence Report states that an organization in India is being attacked on average 1783 times per week in the last 6 months, compared to 1645 attacks per organization in APAC, with 89% of the malicious files in India delivered via Email in the last 30 days.

Managing a bank’s security operations entails many features and areas to protect, which can sometimes be a complex undertaking in keeping up with evolving security needs, from protecting mobile banking to banks’ IoT assets to branch security.

In some instances, connecting bank branches directly to the cloud can significantly increase the risk of attack via malicious files, malware, zero-day, bots, viruses, APTs, and more.

To mitigate these risks, many banks seek to gradually enable their branches with SD-WAN connectivity to the internet and cloud to ensure enhanced security.

Here, I would like to share a real-life use case of a European investment firm, their challenges, and the solution they leveraged to overcome the challenge and boost their security posture, to enable other similar organisations to learn from this organisation’s efforts to bolster their security.

Watch the Cybersecurity for Banks webinar on-demand.

Customer story: European investment firm connects dozens of branches with SD-WAN without compromising security

The European investment firm selected Quantum Edge, Check Point’s on-premise virtual security gateway for high performance and privacy, which is deployed on the VeloCloud appliance. With this solution, the firm secures its connected facilities with top-rated threat prevention, having executed a simple deployment, and thereafter leveraging ongoing simplified management.

Virtual security gateway deployed on VeloCloud

Top-rated threat prevention

Incoming and outgoing connections secured with Firewall, URL Filtering, IPS, Anti-Bot, Antivirus, Threat Emulation

Up to 1 Gbps threat prevention

Simple to deploy & manage

Easy high availability deployment with Velocloud SD-WAN

Unified cloud-based management (Smart1)

Deploy in minutes with SD-WAN partners

Cisco, Velocloud, Versa, Aryaka, Oracle, Citrix, etc.

Banks can also bolster SD-WAN connectivity protection with the Check Point Harmony Connect Firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) solution, which:

Protects branch-to-internet connections

Assures consistent security

Enables a fast setup

Offers fully tested integrations with leading SD-WAN offerings

Firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS)

Protect branch to internet connections

Prevent the most evasive cyber attacks with a full cloud-delivered security stack

Consistent Security & fast setup

Consistent security across 1000’s of branches, 5 mins setup with advanced automation

Fully Tested Integrations

Fully tested integrations with SD-WAN leaders

Solution for securing remote branches from the cloud or on-premises

Check Point Software solutions assure secure SD-WAN connections to the internet and cloud to protect the bank’s remote branch offices from every threat. With Check Point Quantum Edge, connected bank facilities on-premises are secured with top-rated threat prevention. Check Point Harmony connect provides simple integration with any SD-WAN platform to secure connectivity through a powerful cloud service, deployed and managed by Check Point.

Check Point Quantum Security GWs will be extended to include full SD-WAN functionality during 2022 natively, with the following capabilities in mind:

Rich SD-WAN capabilities – to optimize your WAN performance by constantly steering the traffic to the best path automatically

Uncompromising security and performance – Security is essential for any SD-WAN deployment; therefore, we are delivering the best industry’s threat prevention capabilities together with high performance for your WAN infrastructure

Unmatched simplicity and management, so it will be easy to configure and deploy at scale

Watch the Cybersecurity for Banks webinar on-demand.

In conclusion

Check Point enables banks to provide advanced digital services to their customers with the highest level of security to their network, cloud, users, and access, with Check Point Quantum, CloudGuard, Harmony, and Infinity products.

By adopting a consolidated security approach with the Check Point Infinity architecture and services, banks gain pre-emptive protection against advanced fifth-generation attacks while achieving a 50% increase in operational efficiency and a 20% reduction in security costs.

Check Point’s broad cybersecurity offering of solutions and services has enabled 6,500 financial institutions around the world to overcome their toughest challenges today.