The financial sector is where the money is, so it has long been a target of malicious actors. This includes both cybercriminals and insiders, as well as nation-state actors.
Fremont, CA: Over the last few years, there has been a steady increase in the adoption of cloud computing in the financial services sector. Unfortunately, this trend is only going to get worse in the coming years.
The following are the primary drivers of this acceleration:
Scalable Infrastructure: The cloud paradigm is designed with elasticity in mind. For financial institutions, this provides the advantage of scaling up or down without having to deploy additional infrastructure. The rush of customers who received their stimulus checks last year is a prime example of this. Following the announcement of the stimulus checks, many financial institutions succumbed to the onslaught of consumers checking their bank accounts. Those who had elastic presence deployed in the cloud, on the other hand, fared much better.
Business Innovation: Cloud platforms come with a slew of built-in services that can significantly reduce the friction associated with enabling business innovation. For example, elastic Search, Kibana, and Elk Stack can be quickly spun up in Amazon Web Service (AWS) to conduct data analytics and dashboards to assist with business decisions.
Compliance and Certification: Most cloud providers already have compliance built into their platform, and they publish reports for FIs to use for compliance. While FIs are still responsible for security within the cloud, their ability to meet compliance requirements related to cloud security significantly reduces their burden
Security is a top priority in the financial services industry. As a result, cloud providers built security into their services in various ways, such as managed firewalls, critical management systems (KMS) to aid in encryption, DDoS defense, and so on. Furthermore, a lot of innovation happens from cybersecurity vendors that directly relate to the use of the cloud – for example, Bot Mitigation.
Bot mitigation technology has come a long way in mitigating this risk. However, traditional methods of blocking suspect IP addresses have lost their effectiveness over time because attackers can easily find a new pool of IP addresses. This protection is provided by the new generation of cloud-based bot mitigation products, which use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning models to distinguish between bot traffic and human traffic. These are typically very effective at preventing credential stuffing attacks, which almost every FI faces regularly.
