Financial services firms need to innovate and embrace cutting-edge technology to gain a competitive advantage and market success. However, many finance organisations struggle to adapt their security strategies and compliance policies to newly-digitalised workplace processes and supporting architectures. Firms must find the right balance and controls over security operations to support business growth, according to ForeScout Technologies.
Steve Hunter, Senior Director for Asia Pacific & Japan, ForeScout, said, “It’s significantly harder to understand the control status while meeting business demands in an elastic technology environment. Adding devices, servers, virtual machines and access to clouds hinders visibility, fragments control and adds business risk, making it more difficult to stay in compliance.”
To effectively manage risk, security professionals need to identify the most critical processes, applications and technologies to appropriately match them with prioritised protections. ForeScout has identified five key steps that will help financial services firms minimise security risk exposure while embracing operational agility:
1. Identify critical business processes
It’s important to understand which business processes are critical to the organisation and prioritise those according to which ones contribute to competitive advantage or are foundational.
2. Prioritise the securing of the key business processes
Some applications, infrastructure, and devices are so critical to the organisation that they mustn’t be compromised. It’s essential to apply failsafe security practices to protect those. Although this may seem daunting given the sheer volume of devices and virtual machines in most organisations, the right visibility tools make it easier. Firms can start by verifying the accuracy of configuration management database tools and build a foundation of continuous, real-time asset intelligence, then learn the status of critical applications and analyse the security hygiene of devices and the infrastructure that supports them.
3. Apply asset intelligence and implement proper segmentation
Application segmentation is about separating applications so that a compromise in one doesn’t automatically lead to a compromise in the others, but it brings with it sometimes overwhelming complexity and hard-to-quantify interdependencies. Sometimes the better approach is a simpler one. Ensure you’ve operationalised “macro” segmentation before tackling the “micro”. Start with gaining true inventory and asset intelligence, then separate production and development environments. Once that’s done, it becomes possible to decide how to segment the most critical applications from the general IT environment, considering dynamics, risk, and feasibility.
It’s also possible to segment the network according to who’s accessing it. For example, different levels of access for guests versus employees is a good starting point. The segmentation strategy must include servers and cloud workloads supporting applications as well as on-premise devices.
4. Understand endpoint compliance posture
Managed endpoints are the biggest risk for any organisation so it’s essential to keep them patched, updated, and secured. However, the mobility of employees can mean these devices miss deployment of agents or can have agents that are out of date. Real-time posture assessment at the time the device connects to the network, along with subsequent continuous checks, is the only way to minimise this risk. Tools that automatically remediate gaps can help strengthen security.
5. Start continuously monitoring the selected controls
A stricter regulatory environment increases the business impact of cyberthreats. A continuous monitoring program can tell the organisation how effective its controls are, letting the business make the right decisions about security investments and actions sooner.
Steve Hunter said, “Financial services firms continue to be prime targets for cybercriminals looking to steal the most valuable data and gain unauthorised access to financial systems, so it’s essential to protect assets, data, and applications. Although this is more complex in the age of elastic compute and technology, the key is visibility. With the right tools, firms can gain full visibility into everything that’s on the network from guests’ mobile devices to mission-critical applications. They can then secure the network accordingly.”
