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The power of a single view: Unifying security and observability in banking

Operational resilience requires more than monitoring or defense alone. Banks are combining observability and security to reduce risk, costs, and downtime, without missing a beat.

By

Kelly Manrique

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Every minute a bank's systems are down costs millions, and every security breach chips away at customer trust. In 2025, financial services companies are discovering that monitoring their systems and defending them are not separate problems. Banks can no longer have one team monitoring performance and another handling security because today's threats move too fast across interconnected systems. Ken Exner, chief product officer at Elastic, explains in a recent Financial Services Summit webinar discussing how Bank Leumi is unifying its approach to system visibility and security — reducing threat detection time and monitoring costs in the process.

Why banks must unify observability and security

Customers don't distinguish between whether something was cybersecurity-related or IT-related, explains Exner. “They just want to make sure that the financial services they're working with have operational resilience and are always available.” The same is true in the regulatory environment. "There are new regulatory requirements, like DORA in the EU, that require operational resilience, and they don't distinguish between operational resilience — whether it's IT-related, or whether it's cybersecurity-related."

The solution lies in bringing together observability for system monitoring and security for threat detection. Both use similar data — logs, metrics, and real-time system information — meaning banks can gain deeper insights and respond faster by analyzing everything in one place. "Elastic is a complete observability platform. All the analysts, including Gartner, list us as one of the top three most fully functional observability platforms out there. We're the leader in log analytics, but over the last five to seven years, we've built out a complete observability platform that includes APM and metrics, and profiling and tracing, and synthetic monitoring — all the things that you would expect from a complete observability platform," Exner explains.

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Customer spotlight: Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo, one of the largest banks in the US, uses Elastic to combine performance monitoring with business data, giving it the ability to measure the financial impact of availability issues per customer. With Elastic’s unified observability platform, Well Fargo gains real-time insights into system uptime and availability across 70 million customers. This level of insight, previously impossible with siloed systems, allows teams to prioritize fixes based on customer and revenue impact — turning observability into a strategic advantage. Read the full story.

The Bank Leumi example: Faster, smarter, more secure

Israel's largest banking group, Bank Leumi, has demonstrated dramatic results since expanding its use of Elastic's Search AI Platform. Already using Elastic for system monitoring, the bank — which manages assets exceeding $574 billion — recently also consolidated its security operations onto the platform. It now experiences 60% faster threat detection, 50% faster issue remediation, and a 40% reduction in security monitoring costs. Read the full story.

Exner sees GenAI meeting both security and observability needs. "It's hard to find expert practitioners who have a lot of experience, but a lot of that expert capability, a lot of that knowledge, can be contained in an LLM. If you look at what a DevOps professional does or what a security analyst does, they're doing pattern matching ... and a lot of that pattern matching can be better handled by machines than by humans."

Watch the full session: Secure operational resilience starts here

Operational resilience can’t be achieved with fragmented tools. Forward-looking financial institutions are choosing unified platforms that bring together visibility, performance, and protection.

Watch the webinar to learn how Wells Fargo, Bank Leumi, and others are driving resilience and cutting costs with Elastic.

The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this post remain at Elastic's sole discretion. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.

In this blog post, we may have used or referred to third party generative AI tools, which are owned and operated by their respective owners. Elastic does not have any control over the third party tools and we have no responsibility or liability for their content, operation or use, nor for any loss or damage that may arise from your use of such tools. Please exercise caution when using AI tools with personal, sensitive or confidential information. Any data you submit may be used for AI training or other purposes. There is no guarantee that information you provide will be kept secure or confidential. You should familiarize yourself with the privacy practices and terms of use of any generative AI tools prior to use. 

Elastic, Elasticsearch, and associated marks are trademarks, logos or registered trademarks of Elasticsearch N.V. in the United States and other countries. All other company and product names are trademarks, logos or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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