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The past few years have seen cloud adoption soar as organisations have begun to fully understand the benefits that the cloud can offer in terms of storage, flexibility, scalability and cost savings. Within the financial sector, according to KPMG, shifting back-office functions to the cloud allows banks to achieve savings of between 30 and 40 per cent.
As a result, financial services institutions are increasingly adopting the public cloud, and are implementing multi-cloud strategies in order to add a level of redundancy to their cloud service usage. This translates into the ability to meet consumer expectations, reduce costs, and avoid unnecessary lock-in with cloud vendors.
However, moving data to the cloud means that it is stored on off-site servers rather than on-premise under the watchful eye of financial IT teams who have implemented industry-specific security controls. Financial services institutions manage valuable data – a lucrative target for cybercriminals. In order to maintain an effective security posture that extends into the cloud, financial institutions need the capability to merge their siloed cloud security controls into one comprehensive information security infrastructure where consistent security policies can be enforced and easily managed.
The growing risk to multi-cloud cybersecurity in the Financial Services sector
One of the biggest challenges multi-cloud environments have introduced to the security posture of financial institutions is the isolated cloud environments found within networks. With every added cloud-based application, infrastructure, or software service, the number of potential entryways into the organisation’s network that cybercriminals can exploit increases. With these disparate multi-cloud environments comes a variety of obstacles for IT teams to tackle:
A three-pronged approach to minimising cyber risk
By unifying siloed multi-cloud environments with additional virtual and physical network elements, cybersecurity teams within the financial services sector can gain broad visibility and protection across the attack surface, leading to rapid advanced threat detection and automated threat response and breach mitigation.
Additionally, it’s important that IT professionals maintain a number of best practices when actively securing multi-cloud environments, including:
Financial services organisations are increasingly adopting public cloud and transitioning toward a multi-cloud environment to better meet the demands of consumers and streamline business processes. As adoption grows in this critical space, however, cybercriminals continue to search for new ways to find and exploit vulnerabilities – which is why financial services organisations must deploy in-depth security measures to cover the proliferation of endpoint devices, free-ranging applications, and multi-cloud infrastructures themselves.
Traditional security solutions are simply no longer sufficient to protect a digital-dependent organisation. The threat of cloud-based malware means that in order to effectively secure both cloud solutions and network integrity, network elements need to be combined into a unified security fabric that can secure endpoints and clouds, while adding effective segmentation across the physical and digital network elements.
This content is provided by an external author without editing by Finextra. It expresses the views and opinions of the author.
Alex Kreger Founder & CEO at UXDA
22 August
Nick Green Director at Purple Patch Broking Ltd
Priya Kumari
20 August
Oleg Stefanet Chief Risk Officer at payabl.
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