The Tension Between ‘Decentralized Ops’ and ‘Security Compliance’

When responsibilities for security governance, implementation, and innovation are spread across multiple business units, there’s a lack of cohesion that makes security compliance more complex than it needs to be. Navigating this complexity is made even trickier for those still operating on legacy infrastructure. It’s a problem faced by many large banks in the Financial Services sector.

Operational Friction Points

The vast organizational scale of established banks naturally creates a complex operational ecosystem. This often results in fragmented decision-making, with different teams managing isolated parts of the technology and security landscape. While there is an argument to be made for how this approach supports domain expertise, it obscures a bigger problem: inconsistent application of security governance. And inconsistency is a word we want to avoid in banking’s highly regulated environment. 

When it comes to security, there are a few critical shared responsibilities that teams headed by the CISO, CIO, and CTO must all navigate: regulatory compliance, risk management, and incident response. However, as the authority on security governance, it is the CISO who sets the organization’s guiding framework—with the CIO and CTO left to implement its outlined requirements across their respective domains of IT infrastructure and product environments. Even with a single framework in place, siloed operations often lead to inconsistent implementation across departments. Without a unified approach, risk exposure increases—especially when legacy landscapes mean visibility (into who is connecting to what and when) is not the default.

Time and budgets are additional compliance pain points. As the number of regulations relevant to the financial services sector continues to grow, staying compliant has become a resource-intensive endeavor. Audits can stretch over weeks or months, requiring significant investment in both people and technology to ensure that security policies are embedded into day-to-day operations. In legacy set-ups, this burden means manual oversight and patchworking or compensating controls across fragmented systems. The ongoing operational expense of maintaining these controls typically falls to the CIO and CTO, who are already stretching budgets to reduce costs, maintain resilience, and deliver on transformation goals. If security was embedded into the architecture by design, CIOs and CTOs wouldn’t bear the long-term costs of decisions made outside their control. 

Technical Reality Checks

While compliance challenges in day-to-day operations are well known, what happens when banks try to innovate? Increasingly, a gap is emerging surrounding these efforts between the strategic optimism of non-technical leadership and the grounded realism of technical teams.

 As new-age challengers emerge, many banking CEOs equate staying competitive with embracing emerging technologies like AI. It’s true, AI holds real potential to drive innovation, growth, and market leadership. But one major barrier stands in the way: legacy systems weren’t built to support AI integration, increasing exposure risk and the complexity of maintaining security compliance. What’s more, AI introduces a new operational domain with fresh challenges around observability and control. These challenges are compounded by fragmented infrastructures, where the data that AI depends on resides in siloed systems. As a result, previously distinct technology domains are now colliding at greater speed—and with heightened internal volatility, as teams scramble to move fast while staying secure.

Solving for Security at Scale

How do banks address the challenges they face when trying to unify security enforcement across different divisions and innovate across the organization with emerging technologies? Many are turning to zero trust architecture. 

Unlike traditional perimeter-based approaches, this security approach assumes no implicit trust within the network and enforces strict verification at every access point, regardless of user, device, or location. The zero trust model aligns the responsibilities of the CISO, CIO, and CTO by centralizing policy enforcement, improving visibility across systems, and reducing the complexity of managing compliance in siloed environments. 

But zero trust is more than a security framework—it’s a strategic enabler of scalable protection, which becomes clear when we think of these points below: 

• By delivering security as a service and connectivity at scale, zero trust empowers banks to adopt new technologies safely and rapidly.
• It provides the same level of protection, features, and control in both on-prem and cloud use cases, bringing much-needed consistency across hybrid environments. This means teams don’t have to compromise or choose between use cases. Everything works consistently, no matter where the data or applications live.
• It delivers visibility across all domains. This means that while technology domains may remain segmented, the visibility and control is not, allowing security teams to monitor and influence activity without friction.

Data security is embedded at the heart of zero trust’s proxy-based architecture—not bolted on after the fact. It means banks can move quickly to scale new tech integrations—even advanced integrations like AI agents—without compromising compliance or operational integrity. In fact, it offers onramps for both legacy and emerging services, extending protection not just within the bank but also across its broader ecosystem—including partners and community-facing platforms. 

Common Security Language

In a decentralized operating environment, the question of who’s really in charge of security is less about hierarchy and more about cohesion. Zero trust helps banks speak a common security language—one that embeds compliance into every action, across every team, no matter who’s leading the charge.

READY TO SECURE AT SCALE? Financial Services not only want but need a modern security approach to handle the ‘now’ and prepare for ‘what’s next’. The key is finding the right architecture with zero trust at its core to help you secure, simplify and comply with confidence. Find your future-proofed path here