In the FinTech sector, security isn’t a feature—it’s a necessity. One of my FinTech customers had recently undergone a compliance audit that exposed risks around lateral movement and unfiltered east-west traffic. We moved quickly to address this using VCF 5.2.1 and NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB).
VCF Innovations at Work: Using VCF 5.2.1, we deployed NSX ALB for all Layer 4/7 services. Transparent and Non-Transparent LBs were placed strategically to isolate Dev, Test, and Prod traffic zones. NSX ALB’s WAF and Bot Management features were enabled directly from the VCD interface (https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Director/10.4/VMware-Cloud-Director-Tenant-Portal-Guide/GUID-621F5A23-DAA4-4453-90DA-B7ED7A289D8C.html).
TAM Approach: I partnered with security architects and app owners to:
- Map microservices dependencies using Aria Operations for Networks
- Design Application Profiles with custom error pages, L7 policies, and rate-limiting rules
- Enable WAF policies using the OWASP CRS templates
- Configure logging and alerting integrations with SIEM
Results:
- Zero trust enforced between services
- 3x faster patch validation through L4/L7 observability
- PCI-DSS compliance achieved for all production environments
Reference Documentation:
- NSX ALB WAF: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX-Advanced-Load-Balancer/22.1.3/NSX-ALB-Admin/GUID-C8E6EF28-A8D4-4AE1-902E-1829FAD44BFC.html
- NSX ALB Integration with VCD: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Director/10.4/VMware-Cloud-Director-Service-Provider-Admin-Guide/GUID-85BB8759-228D-4E34-9CFA-841EBD14609B.html
