Cyber-security, Cloud and Financial Services

At the start of Covid, cyberattacks on Financial Services organisations were growing at 238%, and at the same time, around 41% of people said they would avoid businesses that were victims of a security breach.

It’s an increasingly hostile and evolving cyberthreat landscape, and enterprise IT environments are becoming ever more complex.

The financial sector has been reluctant to move away from on-premise, in-house technology platforms to run their cyber security protection. This is changing as market forces and advanced threats from cyberspace outstrip the commercial viability and security protection of in-house datacentre operations.

Cybercriminals continue to find new ways to breach defences. 75% of attacks now start through an email. Channel Island businesses have seen such attacks, with simulated and malicious messages being circulated internally with dangerous consequences.

Says Malcolm Mason, Sure’s Cloud and Data expert; “Protecting valuable and sensitive data from a security breach is an arms race between cybercriminals and technology solutions providers. It’s mission critical to protect sensitive data and eliminate downtime in the event of an incident. The consequences of a malicious cyber-attack can threaten the very survival of a business.”

The evolution of cloud services over recent years has seen a growing level of acceptance by the financial sector. The difficulties running and maintaining legacy systems, along with a demand for simpler and more agile customer services, now makes the ‘do it yourself in-house’ model both uneconomic and ill-advised.

Globally, there’s a technology skills shortage in cyber security, and because of this, outsourced highly secure enterprise and private cloud services that meet very stringent operational requirements are increasing in popularity.

There’s a commercial logic to managing core IT in this way. The physical hardware and networking on which services run is the very latest and best available. No Capex is required, and businesses pay only for the services they consume. Legal and regulatory requirements are another factor, with top-tier cloud infrastructures exceeding requirements, and enabling organisations to prove operational compliance.

Scalability is another head ache that has been removed. Such datacentres have ‘bucket-loads’ of resource and capacity, enabling businesses to scale up quickly when launching new services and managing peaks in demand.

Concludes Malcolm Mason; “Cloud’s coming of age is occurring at the very time when many legacy IT systems are about to utter their last breath. Mission critical, highly secure services are ready and waiting to pick up financial services’ workloads.”