Financial services industry in 'turmoil'

Digital transformation brings risk with reward

The financial services industry has hastily entered the digital transformation era, but this is not balanced with appropriate security measures. Almost two thirds (65%) of global financial services organisations have now suffered a data breach, with 28% having suffered a breach in the past year.

Every piece of information used to run a financial services business creates risk – financial data in accounts and investments, personal data on account holders. Add to that new technologies including cloud, containers, mobile payments, Blockchain, IoT, machine learning and AI – and while these might help meet the increased consumer and business demands for improved services and experience, the industry opens itself up to new avenues for attacks and breaches.

Cloud usage with sensitive data is especially high in the financial services industry at 76%. Multiple cloud usage is also high with 60% of organisations using more than 25 SaaS applications and 56% using 3 or more IaaS vendors. This creates a new problem of how to secure data across multiple cloud deployments.

Put the money where the risk is

Security spending is up but not aligning with the new risks. While 78% of global financial organisations report a spending increase on IT security, they are not spending in the right areas. The majority (72%) of IT security pros acknowledge data-at-rest defenses are most effective at protecting data, but only 38% registered a spending increase for those specific tools.

44% recognised encryption as the top tool required to increase cloud usage and half of respondents recongnise that managing encryption keys across multiple-cloud environments is a problem that needs to be solved.