For banks and other financial businesses, every day is a test of critical infrastructure, from market opens and payroll cycles to tax deadlines. Service outages and access issues damage trust, invite regulatory scrutiny, and lead to lost revenue. Every day is a test of critical infrastructure, from market opens and payroll cycles to tax deadlines.
CDNs can absorb attacks before they reach bank servers, cut down how much traffic hits those servers directly, and provide failover when customers are experiencing performance issues or outages.
Just as importantly, CDN logs can provide an extensive, detailed record of every request that hits your infrastructure, from customers accessing your online banking portal to malicious bot activity on API endpoints. These logs are critical for security, compliance, and capacity planning. However, most CDNs and CDN monitoring tools don’t provide complete, long-term visibility that financial institutions require. In this post, we cover why you don’t want gaps in visibility: bot traffic, compliance, customer satisfaction, and multi-CDN setups.
Capture a Complete Record of Bot Traffic
Banks and credit unions are high-value targets for automated attacks, including credential stuffing against login pages, account takeover attempts, and card-testing scripts probing payment flows. To fight this, CDN providers often include bot detection that catches a significant portion of bot traffic before it ever hits your application.
However, bot traffic is getting increasingly sophisticated. F5’s 2025 Advanced Persistent Bots report found that 37.9% of the bot traffic hitting banking websites came from automation sophisticated enough to drive a real browser or mobile app and present tokens that appeared valid. That traffic is harder to detect than a script that’s targeting a login endpoint a thousand times a minute. As bots continue to get better at imitating human behavior, detecting malicious traffic will only get more challenging, resulting in both false positives and false negatives.
Let’s look at credential stuffing specifically. F5’s credential stuffing research puts the median time to discovering a credential spill at 120 days, with the average stretching to 327, and advanced bot behavior increases the risk. CDN providers and traditional CDN monitoring tools have limited retention windows that typically only extend 30 to 90 days. After that period, logs are either discarded or your teams must migrate them to archives or frozen storage where they’re difficult to access.
Teams, overall, don’t seem ready for this reality. A 2026 survey of security teams by Hydrolix found roughly 79% confidence in detecting bot traffic at all, and only 23% of teams were confident that they could act on that traffic before the business was negatively impacted. Advanced detections on their own aren’t enough, especially when financial institutions must deal with the long-term risk of breaches and compliance issues.
Organizations are increasingly combining bot intelligence with bot management to address these issues. Bot intelligence refers to using advanced analytics on large, long-range datasets to better detect and understand the behavior of web and API bot traffic, including whether that traffic is malicious or benign. It can help teams fine-tune and improve the rules that filter out malicious traffic before it reaches an application, detect breaches, and reduce both false negatives and false positives, but it works best on full-fidelity, long-range datasets.
By monitoring and retaining a complete record of logs across all your CDN providers, your teams can apply bot intelligence to ensure that detections are working effectively in real time while also understanding traffic patterns over time that can help detect breaches and support your compliance policies.
Having a complete record of all requests also supports your compliance and security posture. For example, a bot account takeover triggers reimbursement obligations to the customer, a possible SAR filing (the suspicious activity report banks must submit to regulators when fraud is suspected), and breach notification duties on top of both. When a regulator or a customer asks how long the fraudulent activity has been occurring, you’ll only be able to answer if you have a complete record that extends months or even years ago.
Enhance Compliance While Reducing Risk
Compliance requires evidence, not just assurance. Requirement 10 PCI DSS mandates an audit trail for any system that touches cardholder data, specifying what gets logged, a minimum one-year retention period with the most recent three months immediately accessible, and protection against the logs themselves being altered after the fact. CDN infrastructure that routes traffic through payment pages and APIs is impacted by this requirement.
Meanwhile, under the EU’s DORA framework, regulators expect financial institutions to retain evidence that third-party vendor services are working as expected. Routing customer traffic through a third party doesn’t transfer responsibility for that traffic to the third party. Instead, DORA holds financial entities fully accountable for the ICT risk (the risk that any technology system a bank depends on, including ones it doesn’t own, fails or is compromised) of every third-party service they use, including CDNs, and requires continuous monitoring and auditing. Service downtime beyond two hours on a critical function is one of the criteria DORA uses to classify an incident as major, and a major classification starts a fixed reporting clock, with an initial notification within four hours, an intermediate report within 72 hours, and a final report within one month.
Beyond regulatory frameworks, financial institutions must also remain accountable to their own boards and risk committees. DORA expects ongoing, quantifiable evidence that both the board and operations teams are managing vendor risk. That means both the board and operations teams need consistent numbers over time: how often the edge degraded in different regions, how long incidents took to resolve, how risk is trending quarter over quarter. Those numbers exist only if request-level data has been captured and retained consistently in the first place.
While regulatory frameworks don’t explicitly name CDN provider logs, a complete, request-level record from a bank’s CDN traffic can be the most comprehensive, practical way to produce evidence. Your teams should be able to produce request logs for specific time ranges, whether that’s the last 30 days for a board readout, a specific date range requested by auditors, or even a 30-minute period a year ago that pinpoints when a breach first occurred.
Improve Performance and Customer Satisfaction
Customers expect fast, reliable access to their accounts, especially during real-world events that can spike web traffic such as market volatility, tax season, and payday. When access is slow or unreliable, customers lose trust in both the application and the institution.
Complete CDN outages are rare, but at global scale, issues can arise across regions, points of presence (PoPs), or specific network paths, degrading service for customers. A CDN status page doesn’t show these issues, and CDN dashboards typically only show aggregated metrics, which can also hide smaller regional issues. These problems can be very challenging to solve without the ability to drill down into individual logs to surface the root cause.
Navy Federal Credit Union, the largest credit union in the U.S., faced exactly this problem. Before consolidating the data its CDN and network providers collected into one place, a single login or authorization failure could pull an incident bridge of around 20 people across multiple regions, each running their own checks against their own partial view before anyone could confirm the issue was resolved. After moving to one near-real-time view of its edge traffic, that same class of incident went from a resolution measured in hours or days to one measured in seconds and minutes. This kind of resolution speed depends on having a complete, queryable record of every request.
Monitor Multi-CDN Infrastructure
Many financial institutions use multi-CDN architecture for resiliency and cost-efficiency, but having multiple CDNs also adds complexity and makes it more challenging to identify issues across providers. For institutions running multiple CDNs, a separate monitoring system that can correlate and analyze data across CDNs becomes a basic requirement, not a luxury.
Each provider reports on its own traffic using different fields and measurements that make it challenging to compare across providers without standardizing the data first. Without a unified view across all of them, incidents take longer to diagnose, and comparing vendor performance becomes guesswork when a contract renewal depends on the answer. A single, correlated record across providers turns both into straightforward questions instead of open-ended investigations.
Next Steps
- CDN Insights gives financial institutions dashboards for all major CDN providers, backed by full-fidelity raw logs a team can search down to a single request in seconds.
- See a demo of CDN Insights in action.
- Talk to an expert to learn how full-fidelity logs can support your business.
