For years, Citrix has been helping organizations redefine workplace productivity with powerful, secure solutions that meet their unique needs. Many of our customers handle incredibly sensitive data daily, which is why our solutions must meet the highest security requirements without compromising on user experience.
One of Citrix’s longtime customers is among the largest banking institutions in northern Europe, employing more than 20,000 people and serving more than 3 million personal and business customers. With the sheer amount of private financial data the bank manages daily, it is important that the solutions they rely on are powerful, flexible, and able to meet the strict security policies of the world’s most secure financial institutions.
Security Without Compromise
Ensuring that the private financial data of personal and enterprise customers remains entirely secure is a primary concern for the bank. With the banking industry undergoing a massive transformation in today’s digital world, this bank wanted to provide high application performance and a top-notch user experience without compromising on security.
The bank uses Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) as a load balancer, both internally and externally, to ensure incoming requests are always directed to the most optimal backend resources for a smooth user experience.
With web app firewall capabilities integrated in Citrix ADC, the bank is protected from application attacks using a combination of signatures, block lists, and allowed URLs. By filtering both responses and requests, Citrix Web App Firewall is able to detect and block any malicious activity through deep-packet-level inspection, successfully preventing any unauthorized access or even data loss. The bank is now exploring additional capabilities of the web app firewall, using it to protect against volumetric distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and for bot management.
High SSL performance and TLS 1.3 support were also key considerations for the bank when they chose to upgrade to the latest Citrix ADC platforms. One of the bank’s networking architects shared that moving toward TLS 1.3 helped them stay one step ahead of any bad actors.
“Security, especially encryption, is in focus everywhere,” the architect said. “Experience has shown us that security is evolving very quickly. That’s why we are ready to adopt the new security standards — the vulnerabilities are just around the corner; they could be here tomorrow. So, we need to be ahead always.”
TLS 1.3 is the latest iteration of the TLS protocol and brings major security and performance improvements over previous versions. Citrix was the first application delivery controller vendor to support for the protocol in late 2017, while it was still being ratified. We continue to expand on that support with the recent announcement of TLS 1.3 hardware acceleration support. Using Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM), our banking customer can centrally manage SSL and TLS 1.3 support for its entire Citrix ADC fleet via a single console.
Flexibility for Pricing and Capacity
Besides integrated security capabilities and support for TLS 1.3, the pricing and licensing flexibility of Citrix ADC made the decision to upgrade an easy one. With pooled capacity licensing, customers are able to easily allocate capacity to any of their ADC instances according to ever-changing business demands. This is done through Citrix ADM, which acts as a single pane of glass where capacity can be centrally distributed.
In the future, as the bank picks up virtual deployments or expands to public or private clouds, it’ll be able to share its pooled capacity and maintain operational consistency with no issues. In any scenario — on-premises or in the cloud — deploying and configuring new ADC instances is easily managed via Citrix ADM.
The Future of Banking
The bank uses Citrix ADC and its integrated web app firewall to protect against cyberattacks, which continue to grow in number year after year. They also rely heavily on high SSL performance with TLS 1.3 to meet strict security regulations within their region. Along with pooled capacity and Citrix ADM, they are provided with the flexibility, manageability, and security to help them stay one step ahead of the competition.
The modern digital transformation of the banking industry reveals a massive shift as banks seek to offer cutting edge digital solutions to their customers while trying to maintain a consistent security posture. As one of the largest banking institutions in Europe, our customer knew that Citrix solutions were able to help them maintain their reputation of integrity, security, and privacy for sensitive financial information — without sacrificing performance.
