Deep Observability to Boost Cyber Resilience in Indian Finance

Chirag Raichura, Country Manager – India and SAARC, Gigamon

In the following article, Chirag shares his insights on the transformation of India’s financial sector and rising cyber risks. He also explains why Indian financial institutions need deep observability in order to develop cyber resilience.

Chirag, with 25 years of experience in general management, sales leadership, and go-to-market strategy, his proven track record in driving customer-centric initiatives, building strong channel relationships, and leading cross-functional teams will be key to accelerating growth in the region.

For deeper insights, read the full article.

India’s financial sector is transforming at high speed. Real-time payments at population scale, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), central bank–driven digital initiatives, and rapid cloud adoption are reshaping how banks, insurers, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), and fintechs serve customers.

With this growth comes higher cyber risk. Attackers increasingly hide “low and slow” campaigns, lateral movement, and command-and-control activity inside encrypted and East–West traffic across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. At the same time, regulators are tightening expectations, and customers now assume always-on, secure digital services—whether they’re paying via UPI, trading on mobile, or accessing credit in seconds.

Traditional monitoring built mainly on metrics, events, logs, and traces often can’t provide the network context needed to detect, investigate, and validate these threats at scale. Deep observability closes this gap by adding network-derived telemetry—packets, flows, and enriched application metadata—that shows what is happening on the wire, not just what systems choose to log.

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Why Indian Financial Institutions Need Deep Observability

For Indian banks, insurers, NBFCs, and payment providers, deep observability helps to:

• Protect high-value payment systems, trading platforms, and customer data moving across encrypted, ingress-egress, and lateral (East–West) traffic.
• Reduce blind spots created by hybrid and multi-cloud architectures that fragment control across on-premises data centers, private cloud, and multiple public clouds.
• Demonstrate effective controls for frameworks such as PCI DSS 4.0 and regional mandates, with defensible evidence drawn from actual traffic flows.
• Contain tool sprawl and rising costs by feeding observability and security stacks with higher-quality signal instead of ever-growing data volumes.

In short, relying on logs alone is no longer enough.

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What a Deep Observability Pipeline Delivers

A deep observability pipeline efficiently captures, processes, and distributes network-derived telemetry from data centers, clouds, virtualized, and container environments into existing security, observability, and compliance tools.

Instead of replacing the current stack, it:

• Strengthens risk management and security posture by exposing threats concealed in encrypted and East–West traffic.
• Improves compliance and audit readiness with centralized, policy-driven visibility across hybrid environments.
• Increases operational efficiency by filtering duplicate and low-value traffic before it hits expensive tools.

Key Capabilities for Indian Financial Services

For Indian financial institutions, critical capabilities include:

• Complete traffic visibility across data centers, private cloud, and public cloud, including encrypted, ingress-egress, and lateral communications.
• Governed access to encrypted traffic using approaches such as centralized TLS/SSL decryption and pre-encryption visibility techniques that provide plaintext views before data is encrypted, so only approved tools see what they need.
• Selective traffic delivery and enrichment, which removes duplicate or low-value traffic while enriching remaining flows with contextual metadata for faster detection and troubleshooting.
• Application-level intelligence to identify applications, services, AI engines, and dependencies that underpin payments, lending, trading, and digital banking journeys.

These capabilities translate into reduced mean time to detect and resolve incidents, higher service reliability for customer-facing channels, and lower tool and infrastructure spend.

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A Practical Path Forward

Deep observability is no longer a niche concept; it is becoming a foundational layer for secure, resilient, and high-performing financial services in a hybrid cloud world.

For Indian institutions, investing in a deep observability pipeline offers a pragmatic way to:

• Protect digital banking and payment services
• Streamline compliance and audit readiness
• Keep critical systems performing at scale as architectures evolve

Organizations that move early will be better positioned to manage cyber risk, satisfy regulators, and deliver the seamless digital experiences their customers now expect.