A K Capital Services seamlessly integrates security across its network, branches, hybrid cloud and remote workers

A K Capital Services, one of India’s most trusted bond houses, has seamlessly integrated security across its network, branches, hybrid cloud and remote workers.

The organization has done the integration by taking the help of Fortinet’s Security Fabric. It has implemented the Fortinet Security Fabric cybersecurity platform to improve user application experience, enable secure cloud transformation, simplify business operations, reduce cost and manage security with limited skilled resources.

A K Capital Services provide services through management of private placements and public issues in the fixed income market. Incorporated in 1993, it is the flagship company of A K Group, a leading financial conglomerate that operates and develops debt capital. With clients comprising large Indian banks and government, the company is a fund mobilizer for the largest public debt issues, tax-free bonds and private debt placements. The Group has an indelible mark in investment banking with a range of financial products, tapping new investor and issues.

Digital transformation at the organization led to increased bandwidth requirements and the need for secure access to applications in the cloud. The organization was also dealing with the challenges of providing secure, robust, and cost-effective connectivity to the branch offices. They also needed a high performing Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) and better connectivity to securely transfer data from their Data Center to the Disaster Recovery Site as their existing multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) connection was very slow and experiencing a significant amount of downtime. Adding to this, employees began to work from home because of the pandemic. The end result was a degradation in application availability and performance. Not only did the availability issue negatively impact employee collaboration, but it also hurt customer interactions and business. 

A K Capital decided to adopt a new approach to improve network and application performance and reduce the complexity of managing multiple point products that operated in isolation. The business objective was to make their network more robust and efficient to eliminate chronic outages, improve user experience, and simplify and streamline the ability of branch offices to securely access critical business resources. Application visibility was also a priority as the business increasingly started to rely on cloud applications. To achieve that, consistent security had to be seamlessly deployed at the branch offices, endpoints, cloud and data center with user identity management for remote access to help the small security team to manage the expanding network.

“Financial services organizations are adding more remote workers and branch offices while simultaneously adopting new cloud applications and infrastructure. They need secure connectivity solutions that can provide fast, compliant, and secure access to cloud-based applications and the core network.” explains Rajesh Maurya, Regional Vice President, India & SAARC at Fortinet.

The company selected the Fortinet Security Fabric to bring together best of breed security and high performing networking leveraging Fortinet’s integrated security for users and applications including their hybrid cloud environment to consistently secure their applications access. “The Fortinet Security Fabric provides them with all the tools they need and enables them to control costs and optimize operational efficiency at the same time.” adds Rajesh Maurya.

A K Capital deployed the FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls for advance threat protection, including botnet protection, IPS, real time AV and AI-powered cloud sandbox at both the Data Center and the Disaster Recovery Site to achieve high performance while transferring data and help comply with ISO 270001 security compliance standards. The NGFW provides deep SSL inspection without hindering performance which has helped in not only saving time but also helps meet with the required compliance and provide better security while handling financial data.

For their branches, the shift from MPLS to SD-WAN allows direct access to the internet and requires a different approach to security. A K Capital choose to deploy UTP Security bundles that includes advanced content security with real-time protection thanks to AV and AI-powered cloud Sandbox, as well as a full web security package (web, video, and DNS filtering among others).

This FortiGuard rich suite of security technologies natively integrated with NGFW and SD-WAN offerings, provides consistent policy enforcement and closes the security gaps. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN also enables direct access to cloud & on-premises applications and helps in WAN optimization, automation and traffic shaping. The Secure SD-WAN solution has the ability to intelligently identify applications to determine the best path to be taken as a means to enhance performance, even during brown out or black conditions.

To secure their cloud applications and provide seamless visibility across the hybrid environment, FortiGate NGFW virtual machines have been deployed in AWS cloud. This helps them to protect their cloud network traffic with features such as high-performance IPSec virtual private network (VPN) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN, as well as Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDPS), Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), cloud delivered web, video and DNS filtering and anti-malware protection including real time AV with AI powered Cloud Sandbox.

Moreover, with FortiGate NGFW deployed both on-premises and in the cloud, A K Capital gains the advantage of seamless and simplified operations through consistent security and networking policies across their full deployment.

FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer provide simplified management and visibility into the network to manage security with limited skilled professionals. Remote workers connecting to the corporate network from home are identified with FortiToken two-factor authentication.

A single solution provides advance threat protection on premise, in the cloud and secure SD-WAN connectivity with capabilities to hyperscale as their network grows. The seamless integration of cloud security helps them to scale their cloud application requirements to support business growth.

“Fortinet’s integrated approach to security has eliminated the need to manage the network and security using two different solutions. The total cost of ownership has been lowered and the day-to-day security operations has been simplified through a single pane of management. With improved visibility, and response automation we are able to have better control over applications and provide users secure connectivity from anywhere to anywhere. Having a high level of security control across our network along with reduced downtime, is a big enablement factor in our Digital Transformation journey and business expansion plans.” declared Amol Jawharkar, Group Head - IT & CISO at AK Group.

“With secure SD-WAN we are transferring huge volumes of data much faster between Data Center and Disaster Recovery site. As administrators we can monitor content and data, identify hosts on which applications are running and identify users. We are also able to identify vulnerabilities and automatically quarantine suspicious hosts. The solution has Automated compliance auditing, which frees up administration resources to work on other critical technology requirements.” adds Anil Bhagat, Senior Manager IT at AK Group.