Cloud Security Tips for Financial Services: 5 Key Takeaways from an Industry Expert

Today we are pleased to welcome guest blogger Tony Bradley, Senior Manager of Content Marketing for Alert Logic, INAP’s trusted managed security partner and expert in cloud security for financial services customers.
– Wendy Williams, Product Manager, INAP

Show me the money, and I’ll show you a cybercriminal ready to attack.

The sophistication of digital financial services and mobile banking have greatly expanded the attack surface criminals can exploit. While technology has given us the luxuries of quickly depositing a check via our mobile device or shopping online, it has also created ever evolving security challenges.

Planning your cloud security strategy? Below are five key takeaways for IT infrastructure pros in the financial services space:

1. Moving to the cloud changes the entire approach to security. A comprehensive view of your environment is critical, so choose a partner who can provide security monitoring of the environment, as well as network intrusion detection, vulnerability management and log management.

2. The level of expertise and the amount of people needed to maintain compliance using exclusively in-house services is cost prohibitive for all but the rarest of enterprises. The best options are to evaluate a trusted managed services partner or adopt technology that integrates services as part of the solution.

3. eCommerce has paved the way to unprecedented growth and revenue but opens doors to exponential compliance and threat risks. Using public cloud providers calls for 24/7 platform security. It is important to understand who has what security responsibility when utilizing cloud platforms and service providers. Furthermore, it pays to spend time evaluating whether or not your solution provider and partner have a deep understanding of your preferred platform. If they don’t, look elsewhere. This approach will ensure hard-to-detect web attacks such as SQL injection, path traversal and cross-site scripting risks are mitigated.

4. A solution may complement in-house capabilities, however, sometimes getting the right resources becomes a balancing act. As the hottest market today, security experts are scarce. In fact, according to (ISC)², a non-profit IT security organization, there are an estimated 2.93 million cybersecurity positions open and unfilled around the world. The best advice is to develop a relationship with a service provider and a partner who can truly be an extension of your internal team and who has both the technology and resources to ensure constant surveillance, as well as the ability to stand up to any rigorous compliance audit.

5. We’ve only just witnessed the beginning of technologies touting AI capabilities. If you’re ready to adopt an AI-based solution for cybersecurity, ensure that it can draw on data sets of wildly different types, allowing the “bigger picture” to become clear from not only static configuration data and historic local logs but global threat landscapes and concurrent event streams, as well.

It’s more important than ever for businesses in the financial services industry to have the right tools and partners in place. Remember: Any solution you choose should be more than widgets and a slick UI. Too much is on the line. The road to holistic cloud security begins with proper implementation and infrastructure design, detailed, best practice configuration, and a plan for continuous monitoring and threat response. Chat with our partners at INAP today to get started.

About the Author

Tony Bradley is Senior Manager of Content Marketing for Alert Logic. Tony worked in the trenches as a network administrator and security consultant before shifting to the marketing and writing side of things. He is an 11-time Microsoft MVP in security and cloud and has been a CISSP-ISSAP since 2002. Tony has authored or co-authored a dozen books on IT and IT security topics, and is a prolific contributor to online media sites such as Forbes and DevOps.com.