Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have been the go-to solution for securing remote access to banking systems for decades. They created encrypted tunnels for employees, vendors, and auditors to connect with core banking applications. But as cyber threats become more sophisticated, regulatory bodies tighten their grip, and branch operations spread into rural areas, it becomes increasingly clear that VPNs are no longer sufficient for regional and cooperative banks in India.
The Cybersecurity Reality for Banks
The numbers speak for themselves:
In just 10 months of 2023, Indian banks faced 13 lakh cyberattacks, averaging 4,400 daily.
Over the last five years, banks reported 248 successful data breaches.
In the first half of 2025 alone, the RBI imposed ₹15.63 crore in penalties on cooperative banks for compliance failures, many linked to weak cybersecurity practices.
The most concerning factor is that most of these incidents were linked to unauthorized access. With their flat network access model, traditional VPNs make banks highly vulnerable when even one compromised credential slips into the wrong hands.
Why VPNs Are No Longer Enough
Over-Privileged Access
VPNs were built to provide broad network connectivity. Once logged in, users often gain excessive access to applications and systems beyond their role. This “all-or-nothing” model increases the risk of insider threats and lateral movement by attackers.
VPNs were built to provide broad network connectivity. Once logged in, users often gain excessive access to applications and systems beyond their roles.
Lack of Granularity
Banks require strict control over who accesses what. VPNs cannot enforce role-based or context-aware access controls. For example, an external auditor should only be able to view specific reports, not navigate through the entire network.
Operational Complexity
VPN infrastructure is cumbersome to deploy and maintain across hundreds of branches. The overhead of managing configurations, licenses, and updates adds strain to already stretched IT teams in regional banks.
Poor Fit for Hybrid and Remote Work
Banking operations are no longer confined to branch premises. Remote staff, vendors, and regulators need secure but seamless access. VPNs slow down connectivity, especially in rural low-bandwidth areas, hampering productivity.
Audit and Compliance Gaps
VPNs don’t inherently provide built-in audit logs, geo-restriction policies, or continuous verification—making compliance audits more painful and penalties more likely.
The Rise of Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) addresses the shortcomings of VPNs by adopting a “never trust, always verify” mindset. Every user, device, and context is continuously authenticated before and during access. Instead of broad tunnels, ZTNA grants access only to the specific application or service a user is authorized for—nothing more.
For regional and cooperative banks, this shift is a game-changer:
Least-Privilege Access ensures employees, vendors, and auditors only see what they can.
Built-in Audit Trails support RBI inspections without manual effort.
Agentless Options allow quick deployment across diverse user groups.
Resilience in Low-Bandwidth Environments ensures rural branches stay secure without connectivity struggles.
Seqrite ZTNA: Tailored for Banks
Unlike generic ZTNA solutions, Seqrite ZTNA has been designed with India’s banking landscape in mind. It supports various applications, including core banking systems, RDP, SSH, ERP, and CRM, while seamlessly integrating with existing IT infrastructure.
Key differentiators include:
Support for Thick Clients, such as core banking and ERP systems, is critical for cooperative banks.
Out-of-the-Box SaaS Support for modern banking applications.
Centralized Policy Control to simplify access across branches, vendors, and staff.
In fact, a cooperative bank in Western Maharashtra replaced its legacy VPN with Seqrite ZTNA and immediately reduced its security risks. By implementing granular, identity-based access policies, the bank achieved secure branch connectivity, simplified audits, and stronger resilience against unauthorized access.
The Way Forward
The RBI has already stated that cybersecurity resilience will depend on zero-trust approaches. Cooperative and regional banks that continue to rely on legacy VPNs are exposing themselves to cyber risks, regulatory penalties, and operational inefficiencies.
By moving from VPNs to ZTNA, banks can protect their sensitive data, secure their branches and remote workforce, and stay one step ahead of attackers—all while ensuring compliance.
Legacy VPNs are relics of the past. The future of secure banking access is Zero Trust.
Secure your bank’s core systems with Seqrite ZTNA, which is built for India’s cooperative and regional banks to replace risky VPNs with identity-based, least-privilege access. Stay compliant, simplify audits, and secure every branch with Zero Trust.
For months, Eduard Bodak has been sharing glimpses of his visually rich new website. Now, he’s pulling back the curtain to walk us through how three of its most striking animations were built. In this behind-the-scenes look, he shares the reasoning, technical decisions, and lessons learned—from performance trade-offs to working with CSS variables and a custom JavaScript architecture.
Overview
In this breakdown, I’ll walk you through three of the core GSAP animations on my site: flipping 3D cards that animate on scroll, an interactive card that reacts to mouse movement on the pricing page, and a circular layout of cards that subtly rotates as you scroll. I’ll share how I built each one, why I made certain decisions, and what I learned along the way.
Overview of the animations we’re handling here
I’m using Locomotive Scroll V5 in this project to handle scroll progress and viewport detection. Since it already offers built-in progress tracking via data attributes and CSS variables, I chose to use that directly for triggering animations. ScrollTrigger offers a lot of similar functionality in a more integrated way, but for this build, I wanted to keep everything centered around Locomotive’s scroll system to avoid overlap between two scroll-handling libraries.
Personally, I love the simplicity of Locomotive Scroll. You can just add data attributes to specify the trigger offset of the element within the viewport. You can also get a CSS variable --progress on the element through data attributes. This variable represents the current progress of the element and ranges between 0 and 1. This alone can animate a lot with just CSS.
I used this project to shift my focus toward more animations and visual details. It taught me a lot about GSAP, CSS, and how to adjust animations based on what feels right. I’ve always wanted to build sites that spark a little emotion when people visit them.
Note that this setup was tailored to the specific needs of the project, but in cases where scroll behavior, animations, and state management need to be tightly integrated, GSAP’s ScrollTrigger and ScrollSmoother can offer a more unified foundation.
Now, let’s take a closer look at the three animations in action!
Flipping 3D cards on scroll
I split the animation into two parts. The first is about the cards escaping on scroll. The second is about them coming back and flipping back.
While I’m using Locomotive Scroll, I need data-scroll to enable viewport detection on an element. data-scroll-offset specifies the trigger offset of the element within the viewport. It takes two values: one for the offset when the element enters the viewport, and a second for the offset when the element leaves the viewport. The same can be built with GSAP’s ScrollTrigger, just inside the JS.
data-scroll-event-progress="progressHero" will trigger the custom event I defined here. This event allows you to retrieve the current progress of the element, which ranges between 0 and 1.
Inside the JS we can add an EventListener based on the custom event we defined. Getting the progress from it and transfer it to the GSAP timeline.
this.element is here our section we defined before, so it’s data-hero-animation.
Building now the timeline method inside the class. Getting the current timeline progress. Killing the old timeline and clearing any GSAP-applied inline styles (like transforms, opacity, etc.) to avoid residue.
Using requestAnimationFrame() to avoid layout thrashing. Initializes a new, paused GSAP timeline. While we are using Locomotive Scroll it’s important that we pause the timeline, so the progress of Locomotive can handle the animation.
Figuring out relative positioning per card. targetY moves each card down so it ends near the bottom of the container. yOffsets and rotationZValues give each card a unique vertical offset and rotation.
The actual GSAP timeline. Cards slide left or right based on their index (x). Rotate on Z slightly to look scattered. Slide downward (y) to target position. Shrink and tilt (scale, rotateX) for a 3D feel. index * 0.012: adds a subtle stagger between cards.
That’s our timeline for desktop. We can now set up GSAP’s matchMedia() to use it. We can also create different timelines based on the viewport. For example, to adjust the animation on mobile, where such an immersive effect wouldn’t work as well. Even for users who prefer reduced motion, the animation could simply move the cards slightly down and fade them out, as you can see on the live site.
Add this to our init() method to initialize the class when we call it.
init() {
this.setupBreakpoints();
}
We can also add a div with a background color on top of the card and animate its opacity on scroll so it smoothly disappears.
When you look closely, the cards are floating a bit. To achieve that, we can add a repeating animation to the cards. It’s important to animate yPercent here, because we already animated y earlier, so there won’t be any conflicts.
gsap.utils.random(1.5, 2.5) comes in handy to make each floating animation a bit different, so it looks more natural. repeatRefresh: true lets the duration refresh on every repeat.
Part 02
We basically have the same structure as before. Only now we’re using a sticky container. The service_container has height: 350vh, and the service_sticky has min-height: 100vh. That’s our space to play the animation.
In the JS, we can use the progressService event as before to get our Locomotive Scroll progress. We just have another timeline here. I’m using keyframes to really fine-tune the animation.
const position = 2 - index - 1 changes the position, so cards start spread out: right, center, left. With that we can use those arrays [12, 0, -12] in the right order.
There’s the same setupBreakpoints() method as before, so we actually just need to change the timeline animation and can use the same setup as before, only in a new JS class.
We can add the same floating animation we used in part 01, and then we have the disappearing/appearing card effect.
Part 2.1
Another micro detail in that animation is the small progress preview of the three cards in the top right.
We add data-scroll-css-progress to the previous section to get a CSS variable --progress ranging from 0 to 1, which can be used for dynamic CSS effects. This data attribute comes from Locomotive Scroll.
Using CSS calc() with min() and max() to trigger animations at specific progress points. In this case, the first animation starts at 0% and finishes at 33%, the second starts at 33% and finishes at 66%, and the last starts at 66% and finishes at 100%.
On a closer look, you can see a small slide-in animation of the card before the mouse movement takes effect. This is built in GSAP using the onComplete() callback in the timeline. this.card refers to the element with data-price-card.
I’m using an elastic easing that I got from GSAPs Ease Visualizer. The timeline plays when the page loads and triggers the mouse movement animation once complete.
In our initAnimation() method, we can use GSAP’s matchMedia() to enable the mouse movement only when hover and mouse input are available.
this.mm = gsap.matchMedia();
initAnimation() {
this.mm.add("(hover: hover) and (pointer: fine) and (prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)", () => {
gsap.ticker.add(this.mouseMovement);
return () => {
gsap.ticker.remove(this.mouseMovement);
};
});
this.mm.add("(hover: none) and (pointer: coarse) and (prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference)", () => {
...
});
}
By using the media queries hover: hover and pointer: fine, we target only devices that support a mouse and hover. With prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference, we add this animation only when reduced motion is not enabled, making it more accessible. For touch devices or smartphones, we can use hover: none and pointer: coarse to apply a different animation.
I’m using gsap.ticker to run the method this.mouseMovement, which contains the logic for handling the rotation animation.
I originally started with one of the free resources from Osmo (mouse follower) and built this mouse movement animation on top of it. I simplified it to only use the mouse’s x position, which was all I needed.
I also added calculations for how much the card can rotate on the y-axis, and it rotates the z-axis accordingly. That’s how we get this mouse movement animation.
When building these animations, there are always some edge cases I didn’t consider before. For example, what happens when I move my mouse outside the window? Or if I hover over a link or button, should the rotation animation still play?
I added behavior so that when the mouse moves outside, the card rotates back to its original position. The same behavior applies when the mouse leaves the hero section or hovers over navigation elements.
I added a state flag this.isHovering. At the start of mouseMovement(), we check if this.isHovering is false, and if so, return early. The onMouseLeave method rotates the card back to its original position.
We can adjust it further by adding another animation for mobile, since there’s no mouse movement there. Or a subtle reflection effect on the card like in the video. This is done by duplicating the card, adding an overlay with a gradient and backdrop-filter, and animating it similarly to the original card, but with opposite values.
Cards in a circular position that slightly rotate on scroll
First, we build the base of the circularly positioned cards in CSS.
At first, we add all 24 cards, then remove the ones we don’t want to show later because we don’t see them. In the CSS, the .wheel uses a grid display, so we apply grid-area: 1 / 1 to stack the cards. We later add an overlay before the wheel with the same grid-area. By using em we can use a fluid font-size to adjust the size pretty smooth on resizing the viewport.
We can remove the card from 8 to 19 as we don’t see them behind the overlay. It should look like this now.
By adding the data attributes and setup for viewport detection from Locomotive Scroll, which we used in previous modules, we can simply add our GSAP timeline for the rotation animation.
There are probably smarter ways to build these animations than I used. But since this is my first site after changing my direction and GSAP, Locomotive Scroll V5, Swup.js, and CSS animations, I’m pretty happy with the result. This project became a personal playground for learning, it really shows that you learn best by building what you imagine. I don’t know how many times I refactored my code along the way, but it gave me a good understanding of creating accessible animations.
I also did a lot of other animations on the site, mostly using CSS animations combined with JavaScript for the logic behind them.
There are also so many great resources out there to learn GSAP and CSS.
Where I learned the most:
It’s all about how you use it. You can copy and paste, which is fast but doesn’t help you learn much. Or you can build on it your own way and make it yours, that’s at least what helped me learn the most in the end.
New York City, often referred to as the business capital of the world, offers unique opportunities for family businesses. While the allure of this vibrant metropolis goes beyond sparkling skyscrapers and bustling streets, it plays host to a web of advantages that can serve as the perfect backdrop for your business. From the accessibility of diverse resources to a regulatory environment that promotes growth and innovation, New York is undoubtedly a compelling choice for relocating your family business. Here’s a deeper dive into why moving your unique family business to the Big Apple could be one of the best decisions you make.
You Can Make Connections With the Big Dogs
New York City is truly a networking powerhouse, with ample opportunities to rub shoulders with industry leaders and influencers. While vibrant networking events and conferences are regular affairs, they are just the beginning. The city’s reputation as a hub for top-tier professionals creates a unique atmosphere where collaborations are not only possible but often encouraged.
With 38% of moves undertaken by corporations, New York’s strategic importance cannot be overstated. The business landscape here is uniquely competitive yet collaborative, fostering an environment where innovation thrives. Family businesses in particular can find themselves in the advantageous position of being able to learn from and partner with some of the best in their industry.
The chance to form partnerships with high-level businesses is one of New York’s undeniable benefits. Whether it’s through formal business councils or casual networking gatherings, access to these connections is amplified exponentially. The shared experiences and insights gained can fuel growth and transformation for your family business, taking it to new heights.
You’re Near an Endless Supply of Materials
Being in New York means having access to a consistent and diverse supply chain, essential for any thriving business. The logistics network in this city is unparalleled, ensuring that businesses are never far from the vital resources they need. This logistical advantage gives family businesses easy access to both local and global markets.
With 20 million shipping containers crossing our oceans every year, the availability of materials is almost guaranteed. The city’s numerous ports and proximity to major trade routes simplify the importing and exporting processes. For businesses relying on unique materials or varying supplies, this constant flow is invaluable.
Additionally, being close to such a vast network of suppliers means having the flexibility to pivot as market demands change. Family businesses often benefit from this agility, allowing them to adapt and grow efficiently. The ease of sourcing helps in maintaining consistent production rates and meeting customer expectations, further cementing New York’s position as an ideal business locale.
You’re Protected Under Many Laws and Regulations
New York is known for its robust legal framework that supports and protects businesses, making it a safe haven for entrepreneurial ventures. With an array of state and federal laws in place, businesses can flourish in a well-regulated environment. This comprehensive legal protection fosters trust and security for both business owners and consumers.
There are about 1,050 federal laws involving benefits or status for married couples, underscoring the city’s commitment to inclusivity and diversity. For family-run businesses, such a legal ecosystem can be especially beneficial, providing the peace of mind needed to focus on growth and innovation. These laws also ensure fair practices, which can be vital in maintaining a business’s reputation.
The city’s legal environment is further supported by institutions dedicated to assisting businesses navigate regulations efficiently. This guidance is crucial for family businesses seeking to expand or enhance their operations. As New York continues to evolve, it remains a favorable place to operate a business with its commitment to equitable and sustainable business practices.
Relocating your family business to New York is an investment in its future. The city offers unparalleled networking opportunities, an endless logistical supply, and protective regulations that work together to create an environment conducive to success. Family businesses have much to gain by embracing the dynamic and resource-rich environment that New York provides, reinforcing the city’s reputation as a hub of opportunity and innovation.
