Cloud Security in Banking

Banks have usually been dependent on legacy systems, but, now nearly half (46%) of bankers realise that these legacy systems as the major barriers to the evolution of commercial banks. In the banking industry, technology is becoming a vital part and the pressure is on for these banks to revolutionize and implement the latest capabilities. So, banks must overcome the disinclination to modernize their IT infrastructure.

Traditional banks must consider migrating to the cloud, as today most of the private banks progressively launch straight to the cloud as patrons demand the latest technologies.

The competitive environment in the banking sector

The banking sector is facing a lot of internal and external challenges, competitors and new institutions are taking advantage of the digital technologies to leverage their customers with customized product and support at a lower cost. With this, the traditional banking institutions are falling behind in bypassing the competitors and gaining customer retention. Most of these traditional banks are burdened by outmoded operating models and legacy systems. Let look into the internal and external challenges

External threats and challenges

• Disruptive Competition: Competition, disintermediation, fragmentation of the traditional bank value chain
• Challenging Customers: Liquid expectation3, digital life. changing customer base.

Internal challenges

• IT and Business Alignment High time to market, IT initiatives without a clear business strategy. Lack of service mapping and service-level agreements (SLAB)
• IT Model not Adaptable to Change Automation and visualization not delivering expected results, tactical initiatives such as software-defined networks (SONS), but no clear reference architectures
• Mainframe Dependency: Monolithic applications, waterfall development, long development cycles, no levers for managing costs
• Disparate Data Sources and Reporting Methods: From across the enterprise, and using multiple tools and platforms with no true golden source

Market Pressure

• Stagnant Revenue Pools: Continued weakness in bank profitability and pressure to reduce costa
• Changing Regulations: More capital and regulatory constraints

Cloud Can Do More

Cloud offers unparalleled opportunities to meet the internal and external challenges by laying the foundation for digital transformation. Cloud is not just a technology to accomplish isolated tasks, rather a business asset that transforms their business by reshaping their operating models. Cloud helps banks to adapt quickly and scale rapidly to meet changing business needs, Develop new product and service offerings and elevate the customer experience

• Agility to meet volatile business cycles
• Elasticity to support high seasonality and on-demand consumption
• Reorganize IT cost structure moving Capex to Opex
• Cost reduction and improved cost predictability
• Agile application release cycles through DevOps
• Facilitate access to enhanced capabilities (i.e. analysis of massive amounts of data)
• Better operational control of the platform
• Increased security and controls through automation

Cloud security for Banking

According to International Banker, the cloud can help to lower risks associated with on-premise systems including:

• Capacity concerns
• Redundancy needs
• Resiliency requirements

Cloud security technologies can further equip banks with the ability to control issues that arise and proactively protect against them. Centralized visibility across banking branches gives administrators better monitoring abilities.

As per researchers, the cloud security solutions market in the banking sector is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 33.1% for the forecast period (2021 – 2026). More and more financial institutions are using blockchain technology or are in the process of implementing blockchain capabilities as it provides a very high level of safety and security when it comes to exchanging data, information, and money.

An increase in cybersecurity threat is driving the market for banks. This threat is particularly imposing, as breached data exposes the opportunity for immediate and future theft. Cloud computing provides a very high level of data protection, especially for sensitive data that includes customer information.

Comprehensive Cybersecurity Checklist for the Cloud

Identity and Access Management (users, privileges, clients)

• Identity and access management
• Identity governance
• Privileged identity management

Network security (anomalies, threats, activities)

• Monitoring events
• Threat detection and prevention
• Inter-workload protection

Data protection (databases, workloads, content)

• file and folder encryption
• data loss prevention
• vulnerability scanning
• key lifecycle management

Application Security (threat prevention)

• secure application development
• application vulnerability assessment and management

Visibility and intelligence (anomalies, threats, activities)

• Event correlation
• Monitoring and alerting
• Multi-cloud and on-premise integration   

Workload-centric (security and DevOps management)  

• Cloud security policy management
• Patch management
• Auditing of controls      

At Locuz, we provide a layered security approach that addresses Hybrid IT infrastructure as a whole & our Security Lifecycle Services rests on three strong pillars – People, Processes, & Technologies. Together, these provide for secure access for your business applications across all security-relevant data sources & coupled with intelligent analytics we can Detect, Investigate, & Respond by overcoming silos. We Design, Deploy and Manage Cyber Security architecture and use our partner ecosystem to bring Artificial Intelligence-based analytics.