Major FinTech Strengthens Network Security Posture with Standardized Configuration with Itential

INDUSTRY

FinTech

GOALS

Accelerate Network Service Delivery
Reduce Risk & Mitigate Threats
Maximize Engineer Productivity
Standardize Configuration Across Distributed Infrastructure
Integrate Networking with Change Management

USE CASES

Firewall Policy Automation
Software Upgrades
SilverPeak Route Updates
Zscaler Whitelisting
Device Onboarding
Switch & Router Management
Load Balancer Management
Configuration Management & Change Control Integration

INTEGRATIONS

Key Results

Accelerated software upgrades so the team can perform upgrades whenever needed instead of once per year, freeing up the equivalent of 1.11 FTE to focus on higher-value work.

Standardized and streamlined firewall policy management across multiple network and cloud domains.

Saved an estimated 2,313 total hours by automating software upgrade and configuration management use cases.

Integrated configuration management with change control systems to maintain standards.

The Challenge: Escalating Security Requirements in a High-Stakes Industry

Operating in the high-stakes world of financial services, this company faced an escalating challenge: ensuring a robust security posture while managing a sprawling, multi-vendor infrastructure. Frequent software updates and vendor patches are essential to maintaining security — cyber threats evolve quickly, and updates and patches come in much more frequently than they did in the past.

However, the network team faced this challenge armed only with some scattered task automation and mostly manual change processes. Due to the scale of their network and the limitations of their approach, the team was stuck performing upgrades once per year during a designated change window — leaving open windows for potential breaches with devices sitting out of date.

The organization’s technical landscape presented additional hurdles. Their infrastructure spanned multiple domains and vendors, requiring integration across diverse toolsets and systems. Existing Python-based automation scripts addressed small-scale tasks but fell short of delivering end-to-end orchestration. And the manual effort, time, and specialized skills required to manage updates placed growing strain on team capacity.

The yearly change windows just weren’t working. But there was nothing else we could do with what we had. Because we have some pretty stringent security standards, we really just had to try something different.

Network Engineer

Solution: Security at Scale with Itential Orchestration

They adopted Itential to transform their infrastructure, enabling them to orchestrate workflows across multiple network domains and vendors. They leveraged the platform to turn software upgrades and configuration changes from long, manual processes into rapid, end-to-end outcomes — all with the right guardrails in place to ensure configuration consistency.

During the evaluation process, the organization explored a series of use cases through Itential workshops and demos, including SD-WAN deployment, Panorama security rule management, and CI/CD pipeline integration. Their team was able to build workflows for these use cases extremely quickly, translating business logic and SME knowledge into repeatable, scalable assets. That speed and ease of adoption proved Itential was the right choice to revolutionize their network automation strategy.

With Itential, they streamlined software upgrades and compliance policy management, accelerating their ability to implement vendor patches and meet evolving security requirements. They achieved their goals through Itential’s:

End-to-End Orchestration: Seamless integration across their multi-vendor, multi-domain infrastructure, incorporating existing Python scripts and adapting to their network’s complexity.
User-Friendly Workflow Builder: Drag-and-drop functionality abstracts network complexity and enables users to quickly create modular, reusable, scalable workflows.
Out-of-the-Box Integration Capabilities: Rapidly generate API integrations and leverage pre-built integrations for common systems like ServiceNow Palo Alto Panorama, enabling faster time-to-value.
Golden Configuration: Build hierarchical Golden Configuration templates to quickly and comprehensively automate compliance management across multiple device types, vendors, and network domains.
Compliance Reporting: Generate reports across both CLI and API devices and manage Compliance Plans that deliver key compliance insights directly to applications.

Itential let us build out workflows that account for all our requirements. Not just the config push, but things like pre-checks, post-checks, systems of record took up a lot of engineers’ time. It lets us decouple our software upgrades from a preset change window so we can ensure everything is always up to date across the network.

Director, Network & Cloud Infrastructure

Reducing Risk & Delivering Business Impact with Orchestration

By adopting Itential, the company’s network and IT teams can now orchestrate security upgrades and policy changes with unprecedented efficiency, reducing risk and aligning their operations with a broader NetDevOps-driven approach to infrastructure agility.

The primary driver for adopting orchestration was ensuring network security. The slow speed of software upgrades and challenges with configuration management created security vulnerabilities that were unacceptable to the business — especially as the network only grows more important.

Itential provided a framework for accelerating network operations, turning even the most complex manual process into step-by-step workflows built in accordance with business logic and requirements.

Now, the entire network can be managed from one place, allowing teams to keep all devices and services up to date and in compliance with standards and requirements. They’ve already saved an estimated 2,313 hours in total for network personnel, freeing up the equivalent of 1.11 FTE to focus on higher-value work.

They’re leveraging orchestration to minimize vulnerabilities across their network by ensuring vendor patches, firewall rule updates, configuration remediation, and other key processes are as fast and reliable as possible and integrated with change management processes.