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Cloud computing services are popular due to their high scalability, high computing power, high throughput, and quality of services. Businesses in every sector are embracing cloud technology to divest their investment in hardware. The financial services industry is in the early stages of moving to the cloud due to fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the platform’s security.
Here we have discussed enterprise cloud security challenges for the financial services sector and ways to overcome them.
Compliance
Finance services industries are subjected to a host of compliance and regulations as they handle lots of personal information and sensitive data. However, no law or regulation prevents the financial service provider from moving to the cloud platform.
Leading cloud platforms meet various financial industries compliance like ServiceOrganization Controls (SOC) and Payment CardIndustry Data Security Standards. The cloud service providers continuously improve enterprise cloud security to reduce cyber-attacks’ risk and help meet compliance standards applicable to the financial industries.
The cloud services provider allows the financial organization to use 3rd party monitoring and security tools and employ threat mitigation practices to protect confidential data.
Meet Regulations Affecting Financial Services
The financial services industry is required to address a wide range of concerns like anti-terrorism, anti-money laundering, fraud prevention, disclosure, anti-lending discrimination, and privacy.
To address these concerns, the financial services organizations need to ensure the client’s and vendors’ expectations are set. If the organizations use any 3rd party relationships, the parties involved should be aware of the obligations.
The cloud service providers allow the employment of 3rd party monitoring tools that can secure and lock down your data, so it is not used for a nefarious purpose. The security tools monitor and track user access to ensure no unauthorized identities access confidential data.
Cyber-attacks
According to security experts, cyber-attacks on financial services institutions have compromised financial information and personal information of seven million small businesses and 76 million households.
The cloud security system allows organizations to implement minimal access controls. Most cyber-attacks are successful because the cyber attacker can get hold of a privileged account. By employing 3rd party security applications, you can define normal access behavior and create rules to generate alerts when there is a deviation.
The security tools can help define user-level access to ensure the user gets minimal access to the data and functions to perform their job functions. Any suspicious activity by a user is flagged and recorded.
Data Separation and Secure Storage
Financial services generate large amounts of data, but not all data is confidential. The cloud security system can scan each data store and analyze the information in it. The security tools can tag personal data and lock it down for secured storage based on the data categorization policies.
The cloud security tools allow you to encrypt data while on the move or stationary to ensure hackers do not access confidential information. The advanced data management tools on the cloud platform know where the personal data is stored and limit authorized users’ access.
To sum up, the fears of financial services about data security and compliance are misplaced. Cloud security has moved miles ahead to provide optimal protection to confidential data and systems.
