Case Study: African Bank achieves zero-trust security, centralized visibility and 50% SD‑WAN cost reduction with Fortinet

African Bank Adopts Zero-Trust Access Strategy with New Integrated SD-WAN Security Architecture

A medium-sized African bank offering private and corporate financial services faced rising cybercrime and an increasingly unmanageable IT security architecture. Its MPLS-linked branches relied on manual ACLs, a two-vendor approach and no robust remote VPN, which drove up costs, administration overhead and compliance risk as the bank prepared for more digital services and remote access needs.

The bank implemented an integrated Fortinet solution—FortiGate NGFW with SD-WAN plus FortiSwitch, FortiWiFi/FortiAP, FortiADC, FortiClient, FortiNAC, FortiToken, FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer—to centralize visibility, enforce zero-trust access and segment traffic. Results included a 50% reduction in WAN costs by replacing MPLS, lower administration and site-visit overhead, stronger threat protection and easier, ongoing compliance assessment.

African Bank