For a California-based fintech company, rapid growth has been the norm. Over the past four years, the company has expanded from 80 to more than 450 employees, including a globally dispersed team of over 100 developers. Their mission? To build fast, secure, and accessible financial products that allow customers to transact directly from their bank accounts – a bold alternative to traditional, card-based payment systems.

As the company scaled, it became clear that their legacy VPN solution was falling short. While it had served as a basic remote access tool during the company’s early days, the demands of a remote-first, cloud-native organization soon exposed its limitations. The wake-up call came when a critical vulnerability was discovered in their VPN product, which forced leadership to rethink their approach to access and security.

Time for Zero Trust

Recognizing the urgency, the company assembled a team of stakeholders – including the CISO, director of IT, head of network operations, compliance officer, and procurement lead, to evaluate secure access and networking products. The focus was to find a solution that would enforce zero trust access, minimize risk, and scale efficiently without slowing down innovation.

After evaluating three options, the team selected Harmony SASE, and with the help of Check Point’s professional services team, deployed it in under a week.

The platform now serves as the secure foundation for the company’s hybrid development environment – spanning GitHub, Jira, AWS, Azure, and multiple third-party SaaS applications used across the company’s business units.

Smart, Granular Access Control

With Harmony SASE in place, the company gained powerful new capabilities. Zero trust principles are now baked into the company’s access model, ensuring that users only reach the apps and resources they’re authorized to use. This means no lateral movement and no broad network access. Users across the organization are now subject to fine-grained policies that enforce access based on identity, role, and device posture. The team particularly liked the fact that they could enforce security checks for third-party contractors, which the other vendors didn’t provide.

Harmony SASE also supports IP-based allow-listing for sensitive SaaS applications, giving the company an added layer of control over who can access business-critical systems like CRM, HR, and banking tools. This has been particularly valuable in maintaining regulatory compliance as the company deepens its partnerships with financial institutions and tech providers.

Agility + Security at Scale

With their partners demanding new payments models and enhanced capabilities, the company is in hypergrowth mode, with ARR doubling year over year and a development model that emphasizes rapid iteration and deployment. They track metrics like customer churn, acquisition cost, and NPS, although profitability isn’t the highest priority – operational efficiency is. Check Point’s SASE solution helps them meet that need, enabling secure, seamless connectivity without the drag of legacy infrastructure.

“Speed is everything here,” said one team lead at the company. “We couldn’t afford weeks of disruption. Harmony SASE didn’t just deliver tech, they delivered velocity.”

By turning a security crisis into a transformation opportunity, the company is now better equipped to scale securely, serve customers faster, and maintain the trust that’s foundational to their business model.

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