Addressing the Key Financial Services Cybersecurity Challenges in Today’s Economy

By Renee Tarun, deputy CISO, Fortinet

Cybercriminals regularly target the financial services sector. In fact, according to a recent

Boston Consulting Group report, cybercriminals attack this industry 300 times more than any other. Facing constant intrusion attempts and other attacks, financial services organizations often find it difficult to move from a reactive cybersecurity stance to a proactive one.

Realizing this goal is complicated by the cost of breaches, a continually expanding attack surface and a growing number of regulations that must be met with regards to the use of financial and personal data. Protecting extremely sensitive data is a top priority, for both business and compliance reasons. But security cannot come at the expense of network performance, as consumers and businesses increasingly demand real-time access to every offering, from online and mobile banking to high-frequency trading. At the same time, institutions must control costs and optimize operational efficiency to remain competitive in an industry with many players.

When it comes to choosing a cybersecurity solution – or set of solutions – financial services organizations should evaluate the options based on the following criteria: cost, visibility, operational efficiency and flexibility.

Addressing the issue of cost reduction

As in many other industries, financial services has an ongoing mandate to manage and reduce costs across the IT environment. Cybersecurity budgets require strategic financial and human resource allocation, since failure is expensive. The cost to a financial institute for a cybersecurity attack specifically targeting their online banking services costs an average of USD $1.8 million (€ 1.5 million),  for example.

Given that money and staff time are finite, risk tolerance must be balanced against risk posture, and trade-offs must be made. Adding to these challenges are cybersecurity staff shortages, which make it difficult and expensive to fill certain roles—if they can be filled at all.

The need for greater visibility

The potential for attack continues to expand, making the network harder to defend. The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the adoption of multiple clouds for business services, and the use of mobile devices by customers and employees rapidly expands the attack surface. The shift to remote work that many organizations have undergone as a result of the global pandemic is another significant factor. In fact, 60% of organizations reported an increase in cybersecurity breach attempts following the move to remote work, according to a recent survey by Fortinet.

As a result of this increasingly complex situation, some financial services firms deploy more and more point security products to cover the gaps created by the expanding attack surface. The resulting security silos obfuscate visibility—increasing operational inefficiencies and ratcheting up risk.

Attaining more flexibility

As cloud applications and infrastructure become increasingly popular among financial services organizations, the security architecture must be sufficiently agile to enable fast, secure and compliant public, private and hybrid cloud-based services. And it must do this while protecting traditional on-premises services at the same time.

Achieving operational efficiency

Operational inefficiencies increase when there is lack of integration across the different security elements and architectural fragmentation. Without integration, many security workflows must be managed manually. In addition to delaying threat detection, prevention and response, architectural silos create redundancies, increased operational costs, and potential holes in an organization’s cybersecurity posture.

Use case: Content inspection zone cybersecurity

How do these elements play out in real-world scenarios? As an example, consider content inspection zone cybersecurity. An organization’s infrastructure is no longer neatly contained within its in-house data center infrastructure, as mentioned above. A survey conducted last year by IDC found that 93.2% of respondents were using “multiple infrastructure clouds” for their business operations; 81% of those respondents used multiple public clouds and one or more private or dedicated clouds. Software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) technologies are now routinely moving organizations’ network traffic over the public internet, and IoT devices are proliferating at the edge.

Consequently, financial services institutions can no longer operate based on a perimeter-based approach to cybersecurity. It is more effective to think in terms of a content inspection zone—a virtual perimeter that spans corporate data centers, multiple clouds, IoT devices and network traffic moving on the public internet. Next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) use purpose-built security processors and comprehensive threat intelligence to deliver top-rated, high-performance inspection of clear-texted and encrypted traffic. Single-pane-of-glass visibility and control across on-premises and cloud-based environments drives operational efficiency and enhanced security.

Choose carefully

The financial services sector holds the dubious distinction of being targeted by cybercriminals more than any other sector. Because its assets are so valuable, financial services organizations must hold to a higher standard of cybersecurity while also adhering to significant regulatory requirements. The cost of a breach is rising simultaneously with the lack of professionals with needed cybersecurity skills. Rather than buying more and more point solutions to address increasing risk, organizations must consider a more cohesive approach using the decision criteria of cost, visibility, operational efficiency and flexibility. These criteria help financial services firms craft a holistic security approach that is effective and easier to manage and doesn’t break the bank.