A Belgian wealth management firm managing over €450 million in client assets replaced its fragmented security stack with Jimber’s unified SASE platform. The result: a 58% reduction in total security costs, faster compliance reporting, and stronger protection for sensitive client data across hybrid work environments.
Key results at a glance
| Metric | Before | After (with Jimber) |
|---|---|---|
| Total security cost | Baseline | 58% reduction |
| Security tools in use | 8+ separate consoles | 1 Jimber cloud-managed platform |
| Remote access latency | 85 ms (VPN backhaul) | 12 ms (Jimber local breakout) |
| Compliance reporting | Manual, multi-tool evidence | Centralised audit trail |
| Agentless device coverage | Unmanaged blind spots | Full isolation via Jimber NIAC |
How does SASE reduce security costs for financial services firms? A summary:
- Eliminate VPN concentrators and on-premise firewall hardware.
- Replace multiple security licences with a single per-user subscription.
- Reduce management time by operating from one console instead of four or five.
- Improve remote access performance, cutting latency and support tickets.
- Simplify DORA and NIS2 compliance with a centralised audit trail.
Why wealth managers face disproportionate security costs
Wealth management firms handle some of the most sensitive data in financial services. Client portfolios, estate plans, tax structures, and transaction histories demand strict confidentiality. A single breach can trigger client withdrawals, regulatory penalties, and reputational damage that smaller firms rarely survive.
Industry data paints a clear picture. The average cost of a financial services data breach reached $5.56 million in 2025, well above the global average. In Belgium specifically, cyber claims increased 64% year-over-year, and the average SME attack cost exceeded €300,000. Perhaps most telling: 88% of wealth management executives acknowledge that a successful cyberattack would likely prompt clients to move their assets elsewhere.
Yet most mid-market wealth managers still operate with a patchwork of security tools assembled over years. Separate products for VPN access, web filtering, firewall management, endpoint protection, and device monitoring. Each tool has its own console, its own licensing cycle, and its own maintenance requirements. For a firm with a small IT team, this fragmentation consumes budget and attention without delivering proportionate protection.
What the security stack looked like before
The firm’s previous setup was typical for a Belgian financial services organisation of its size. A hardware VPN concentrator handled remote access for advisors working from client sites and home offices. On-premise firewalls protected the main office and a secondary location. A separate web filtering tool managed internet access policies. Individual endpoint protection licences covered managed laptops.
This configuration created several problems.
The VPN routed all remote traffic through the main office before sending it back out to cloud applications. An advisor connecting from Brussels to a SaaS platform hosted in Frankfurt would see their traffic travel to the firm’s Antwerp office first, adding latency and creating bottlenecks during peak hours. Advisors reported slow connections and frequent timeouts, particularly when accessing portfolio management and reporting tools.
Firewall rule sets had grown complex over time. Policy exceptions accumulated without regular review. The IT team spent hours each month managing firmware updates, certificate renewals, and licence compliance across multiple appliances.
Printers, meeting room displays, and other shared devices sat on the same network segments as workstations. Without agents or isolation, these devices represented blind spots that a determined attacker could use as pivot points.
Compliance reporting required pulling data from multiple systems, correlating logs manually, and assembling evidence packages for auditors. With DORA now in effect and FSMA actively supervising financial entities, this manual process was unsustainable.
Why the firm chose Jimber
The firm worked with a Belgian service partner to evaluate SASE alternatives. Three criteria guided the decision: total cost of ownership across a three-year horizon, operational simplicity for a lean IT team, and alignment with DORA and GDPR requirements without adding compliance overhead.
Jimber stood out on all three counts. As a Belgian SASE provider, the platform offered European data sovereignty by default, removing concerns about US CLOUD Act exposure that came with American vendors. The single-console approach meant the IT team would manage one platform instead of five. And the transparent per-user pricing made three-year TCO projections straightforward, with no bandwidth-based surcharges or hidden add-ons.
The migration to Jimber followed a phased approach over eight weeks.
Weeks one and two focused on identity integration and application mapping. The firm connected its identity provider to the Jimber platform, mapped user roles to specific applications, and defined device posture baselines for managed laptops. The team also catalogued agentless devices that needed isolation.
Weeks three and four introduced Jimber’s Zero Trust Network Access for the first group of users, starting with internal web applications and the portfolio management system. Advisors accessed applications directly through identity-verified, posture-checked connections rather than a broad VPN tunnel. Jimber’s Secure Web Gateway went live simultaneously with baseline filtering policies that matched the firm’s acceptable use requirements.
Weeks five and six expanded ZTNA coverage to all internal applications and key SaaS tools. Jimber’s NIAC hardware was deployed to isolate printers, displays, and other agentless devices, creating controlled access paths that prevented lateral movement. The firm’s two offices were connected via Jimber SD-WAN, replacing the previous site-to-site VPN with application-aware routing.
Weeks seven and eight completed the transition. Legacy VPN concentrators were decommissioned. Firewall appliances at both sites were retired. Log streaming to the firm’s SIEM was configured from Jimber’s single management console, and the team documented its new operating model for DORA compliance evidence.
Where the 58% cost reduction came from
The savings were not concentrated in a single line item. They accumulated across five areas.
Hardware elimination accounted for the largest share. Retiring VPN concentrators at two locations, decommissioning on-premise firewall appliances, and eliminating the associated support contracts removed a significant annual expense. No replacement hardware was needed because Jimber’s platform is fully cloud-managed.
Licence consolidation delivered the second largest saving. The firm previously held separate licences for VPN, web filtering, firewall management, and remote access. A single Jimber per-user subscription replaced all of these with transparent, predictable pricing and no bandwidth-based surcharges.
Reduced management time freed up the IT team. Maintaining Jimber’s single console instead of four or five separate tools eliminated hours of weekly configuration, patching, and troubleshooting. Policy changes that previously required touching multiple systems now took minutes in the Jimber interface. The firm estimated a 60% reduction in time spent on routine security operations.
Improved productivity had an indirect but measurable impact. Remote access latency dropped from 85 ms to 12 ms. Advisors reported fewer connection drops and faster access to portfolio tools during client meetings. Fewer support tickets related to VPN issues meant less disruption for both users and the IT team.
Simplified compliance reduced the cost of audit preparation. Evidence that previously required manual correlation across multiple tools now came from Jimber’s single audit trail with policy versioning, access logs, and device posture records in one place.
Industry benchmarks support this level of savings. Analyst research consistently shows SASE deployments achieving 20-40% TCO reductions through tool consolidation alone, with organisations replacing MPLS and VPN infrastructure seeing savings of 50% or more. For a mid-market firm with proportionally higher per-user costs from point products, the upper end of this range is well within reach.
How Jimber’s SASE platform addresses DORA requirements
DORA became fully applicable in January 2025, and Belgian wealth managers fall under FSMA supervision for compliance. The regulation’s five pillars each benefit from Jimber’s unified approach.
ICT risk management requires a documented framework covering identification, protection, detection, response, and recovery. Jimber’s single SASE platform with Zero Trust access controls, web security, and centralised monitoring provides this framework without requiring separate documentation for each point product.
Incident reporting imposes tight timelines. Firms must submit an initial notification within four hours of classifying a major incident, with intermediate and final reports following at 72 hours and one month. Jimber’s centralised logging and real-time alerting make rapid classification and evidence generation practical for a small team.
Resilience testing requires at minimum annual vulnerability assessments. Cloud-managed security with continuous updates reduces the attack surface that needs testing, while centralised visibility simplifies the scoping and reporting process.
Third-party risk management demands a register of all ICT contractual arrangements. Consolidating from eight or more security vendors to Jimber as a single platform directly reduces the register burden and simplifies oversight of third-party dependencies.
Information sharing encourages threat intelligence exchange. Integrated threat feeds and automated indicator sharing within the platform support this requirement without additional tools.
The proportionality principle in DORA (Article 4) is important here. Smaller wealth managers can implement requirements proportionate to their size and risk profile. Jimber helps firms demonstrate proportionate, effective controls without the overhead of enterprise-grade security operations centres.
What other financial services firms can learn from this
The firm’s experience reflects patterns visible across the European mid-market financial sector. Three observations stand out.
First, the biggest cost driver is not any single expensive tool. It is the cumulative overhead of managing multiple disconnected products. Licence costs, hardware refresh cycles, training requirements, and the management time needed to keep everything aligned add up faster than most firms realise. A thorough cost audit that captures all of these elements often reveals that the total is 40-60% higher than what appears in the security line item alone.
Second, DORA compliance is not just a regulatory checkbox. It is an operational framework that rewards consolidation. Firms that approach DORA as an opportunity to simplify rather than a burden to endure tend to achieve both better compliance outcomes and lower costs. The audit trail, policy versioning, and access governance that DORA demands are natural outputs of how Jimber’s platform operates by default.
Third, agentless devices matter more than most wealth managers expect. Printers, scanners, and meeting room equipment in shared office spaces are common in financial services. Without isolation, these devices sit on the same network as workstations processing client data. Jimber’s NIAC hardware closes this gap without requiring agents on devices that cannot run them, creating a secure bridge between managed and unmanaged equipment.
Why Jimber fits mid-market financial services
Jimber delivers Real SASE in a single cloud-managed platform built for European mid-market organisations and the service partners that support them. This case demonstrates how the platform’s architecture directly addresses the financial services use case.
The combination of Zero Trust Network Access for granular per-application access, a Secure Web Gateway and Firewall-as-a-Service for consistent web controls, SD-WAN for secure multi-site connectivity, and NIAC hardware for agentless device isolation replaced the firm’s entire legacy stack in eight weeks.
Three aspects matter most for financial services. European data sovereignty means client data stays within EU jurisdiction, with no exposure to US CLOUD Act or FISA Section 702 requests. The partner-first model means firms can work with their existing Belgian service partner for implementation and ongoing support. And the phased rollout approach means no big-bang migrations that disrupt client-facing operations.
Ready to see what consolidated SASE costs for your firm?
Book a demo and get a tailored cost comparison for your current security stack.
FAQ
How much can a mid-market firm realistically save by switching to SASE?
Industry benchmarks show 20-40% TCO savings from tool consolidation alone. Firms that also replace MPLS links and VPN hardware regularly achieve 50% or more. The exact figure depends on your current stack, number of sites, and remote user count.
Does SASE meet DORA requirements for wealth managers?
Yes. A unified SASE platform supports all five DORA pillars: ICT risk management, incident reporting, resilience testing, third-party risk management, and information sharing. The proportionality principle allows smaller firms to implement controls appropriate to their size.
How long does a SASE migration take for a mid-market financial firm?
A typical mid-market deployment with 50-200 users takes six to ten weeks, including identity integration, phased application onboarding, and legacy decommissioning. The phased approach avoids disruption to client-facing operations.
What happens to devices that cannot run a security agent?
NIAC hardware provides inline isolation for printers, scanners, IoT devices, and other agentless equipment. These devices are placed behind controlled access paths that permit only defined communication flows, preventing lateral movement without requiring software installation.
Is European data sovereignty important for wealth managers?
Under GDPR and DORA, firms must demonstrate appropriate data governance. Using a SASE provider headquartered in the EU eliminates jurisdictional concerns related to US surveillance legislation and simplifies regulatory reporting.
Can our existing service partner implement this?
Jimber operates through a partner-first model. Belgian service partners, MSPs, and distributors can deliver the full platform through a multi-tenant console with transparent margins and predictable pricing.
