Originally posted on http://www.vmware.com by Steve Fusco

The Financial Services industry has a significant challenge that will continue to be a top priority for the foreseeable future. 

Cyber-attacks continue to evolve and don’t appear to be slowing down.  The insider threats will continue plus the stress from the pandemic may adversely impact trusted employees working from home.  In addition, employee attrition rates continue to rise during these difficult times.  If your cyber skilled employees decide to leave, it is more difficult than ever to replace them but are critical to your organization’s success and reputation.

Plus, the costs of a breach are well documented and can be extreme.  These costs include discovering and responding to the breach, the cost of downtime and lost revenue the long-term reputational damage to a business and its brand.

As a result, financial institutions must work on strengthening their cyber security resilience and accelerate this transformation to protect their company and their assets.

Preventative controls and rapid recovery mechanisms from malware, ransomware, and other attack profiles need to be woven into all aspects of your digital architecture.  Security must be a built-in distributed service with the security controls and consistent policy enforcement across multi-cloud environments.  Implementing a Zero Trust strategy will connect critical Zero Trust control points.  Improved data sharing between Security and IT Operations and Development teams are fundamental considering the increased regulatory scrutiny on security and privacy. 

The ability to take faster action with greater efficiency and spend less time on threat administration, run fewer security products, and gain trustworthy and actionable threat intelligence should be a number one priority. Zero Trust embedded security and advanced threat detection tools will allow you to assess vulnerabilities, identify gaps in defenses, and quickly adjust controls and policies to thwart attacks. 

Achieving these goals will allow your financial services firm to focus critical resources on impending business differentiators like a better customer experience, modernizing their applications, M&A, and responding to changing industry regulations.