Protecting the cloud in financial services
Continuous security for continuous change
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by Reeza Meer
Like their counterparts in many sectors, financial services organisations made huge strides during the pandemic to adapt to a radically changing business environment. This required the roll-out of innovative new digital services to support rapidly evolving customer behaviour. Over a third of consumers claim to have increased their online banking during the crisis, for example. And it demanded the large-scale roll-out of online collaboration capabilities and hardware to support mass remote working for staff. Behind it all was cloud transformation.
Yet on the other side, these changes opened the door to new risks. Banking was second only to the government sector in terms of most popular targets for ransomware last year. In-house skills shortages and cloud complexity threaten to create multiple gaps for threat actors to exploit.
Building a business fit for the post-pandemic world will require a foundational layer of effective security. That means everything from protecting DevOps pipelines to effective detection and response.
The journey starts here
Financial services firms were digitally transforming even before the pandemic. But the past 18 months has accelerated their efforts tremendously. Their challenges now include:
- Migrating to the cloud whilst navigating the problems posed by legacy tech and internal processes
- FinTech rivals with more agile businesses and innovative product sets
- Demanding customers who expect ease and simplicity when using their financial apps
- Mounting complexity which can make it more difficult to provide seamless customer experiences across channels
- Compliance with an increasingly rigorous regulatory environment
Securing the cloud in this context can be a daunting prospect. Legacy on-premises tools are no longer fit-for-purpose and even the skills set of your IT team may need updating. Multiple point solutions make security unmanageable and can leave additional gaps for the bad guys to exploit.
In short, financial services firms need to consolidate on a single provider to serve all of their hybrid and multi-cloud needs from a single agent, platform and UI. They need protection from DevOps CI/CD pipelines right through to production workloads—across physical, virtual, cloud and container environments. And they need detection and response which goes beyond the endpoint to collect and analyse data from cloud workloads, networks, servers and email to support rapid response.
Why Trend Micro?
Trend Micro Cloud One is that single platform. It leverages the close partnerships Trend Micro has wrought with all major cloud platform providers to provide tight integration and seamless visibility and control across any hybrid and multi-cloud environment. It automates the discovery and protection of public, private and virtual cloud environments, saving IT time and effort moving between different platforms and UIs.
Backed by intelligence from the Zero Day Initiative and Trend Micro’s Smart Protection Network, it offers all-in-one security covering:
- Cloud networks
- Serverless functions, APIs and applications
- Virtual physical cloud and container workloads
- Image scanning in DevOps build pipelines
- Cloud security posture management
- File storage
- Open source vulnerability monitoring
It’s security which builds business confidence in digital transformation as financial services organisations look to kick start the new post-pandemic era.