When your network underpins sensitive financial transactions, every misconfiguration, delay, or security gap can introduce risks that impact customers and compliance. For the network team at a major FinTech company, ensuring security across their vast, complex infrastructure had become an uphill battle.
Despite their skills and best efforts, they struggled to keep up with security updates coming in from device vendors. The legacy process they relied on — a yearly change window where the team would go through and update all devices — was no longer fit for purpose. Manual changes outside of this window would create downtime and disruption for their managed services customers, but modern devices receive security patches more frequently than ever. Continuing to rely on the yearly window was opening up critical security vulnerabilities.
They needed a way to deploy device updates quickly, reliably, at scale, and without adding more operational overhead. With our track record in financial services, Itential’s Platform was a perfect solution to help transform their security capabilities.
The Challenge: A Fragmented Network with Hidden Vulnerabilities
The company’s network team was responsible for securing a massive, distributed infrastructure that supported critical financial services. As a provider of products and services around financial reporting, data storage and transfer, and other mission-critical financial services, they couldn’t afford to have anything less than a best-in-class security posture. Otherwise, they could start to lose customers and revenue.
However, with thousands of devices and services spanning multiple environments, maintaining consistent security configurations and ensuring each device was up to date was a daunting task.
The problem wasn’t a lack of expertise — these engineers knew what needed to be done. The issue was scale. Configurations varied between devices, different teams handled changes in different ways, and every manual adjustment introduced potential human error. And with manual methods, updating each individual device’s software could take a long time — and interrupt the network in the process.
As a result, the team faced three major challenges:
- Security Gaps: Without a way to enforce standardized configurations at scale, vulnerabilities could stay open for long periods of time.
- Compliance Risks: Auditing configuration compliance was time-consuming and error-prone, making regulatory adherence a constant struggle.
- Operational Bottlenecks: Engineers spent too much time manually configuring devices, responding to security incidents, and troubleshooting misconfigurations instead of focusing on strategic initiatives.
They needed a way to bring consistency, security, and efficiency to their network — without adding unnecessary complexity.
The Itential Solution: Standardizing Security with Automation & Orchestration
The team turned to Itential’s Platform to transform their network security approach.
With Itential’s industry-leading features for network device integration, workflow orchestration, and configuration management across both CLI and API network elements, they could enforce standardized configurations across their entire network, ensuring every device adhered to security best practices.
Key Capabilities That Made the Difference:
- Automated Configuration Enforcement: Instead of relying on manual updates, the team used Itential to push standardized configurations across all devices automatically. They can now built Compliance Plans to deploy configuration changes to multiple device types at once and easily push changes whenever a vendor releases a patch, or a firewall rule needs to be updated.
- Compliance Validation & Reporting: With built-in compliance checks, engineers could instantly verify whether configurations met security policies — eliminating the need for tedious, manual audits. Itential’s reporting capabilities extend across both physical devices controlled via CLI and API-driven services, allowing the network team to have full visibility.
- Streamlined End-to-End Orchestration: Complex manual tasks have been simplified into automated workflows aligned with business logic, enabling rapid patch deployments, firewall updates, and configuration remediation — saving the network team an estimated 2,313 hours annually to focus on higher-value work.
Itential didn’t just help them automate tasks — it gave them an entirely new operating model. Instead of reactive, manual security enforcement that left them vulnerable, the team has the ability to proactively enforce standards, push changes, and audit vulnerabilities across their entire network.
The Transformation: A Security-First, Scalable Network Model
With Itential, the company’s network team achieved what once seemed impossible: full confidence in their security posture. No more chasing down misconfigurations, no more scrambling to fix vulnerabilities after the fact — just consistent, secure, and compliant network operations.
What Changed?
- Faster Security Updates: Standardized configurations were enforced across all devices instantly, eliminating delays in securing the network.
- Stronger Compliance Posture: Audits became a simple check rather than a massive, time-consuming effort.
- More Time for Innovation: Engineers shifted from firefighting to focusing on strategic security initiatives.
For network teams in financial services, security is a never-ending challenge — but it doesn’t have to be an uphill battle. Standardization and automation are the key to scaling security without sacrificing efficiency.
Want to learn how your team can achieve similar success? Take a look at the full customer story for more details — or dive into Itential’s configuration management capabilities here to see how your team could benefit.