Access Management for Critical Systems
in Finance and Banking

Financial institutions are 300 times more likely than other institutions to experience a cyberattack

Financial organizations have made heavy investments in cybersecurity over the years, at an average of 10% of their IT budgets on cybersecurity. But despite the heavy investment, cyber attacks on financial institutions continue to surge (and succeed) with increasingly higher costs associated with each attack. A financial organization can now expect to pay $18.3 million for a cyber attack — the highest cost of any industry.

To make matters worse, cybersecurity threats to the financial sector don’t just come from external sources, like criminals trying to break into a bank. There are risks associated with financial third parties and service providers who are granted internal access to data and systems, as well as the insider threat from employees (both malicious and negligent). On average, a financial services employee has access to nearly 11 million files the day they start work. Expand that across the employee base, and you start to understand the scope and volume of critical assets financial institutions have to secure.

Given these threats and the effects of cyber attacks on financial institutions, the regulatory environment is constantly evolving to keep up with cyber risks that jeopardize critical assets and sensitive data. Financial data security regulations ranging from SOX compliance and GLBA compliance to GDPR and CCPA are all designed to hold organizations accountable for protecting critical assets like customer’s NPI (nonpublic personal information) and financial data and systems. Failure to do so has heavy consequences, with more aggressive enforcement, monetary fines, lawsuits, and criminal penalties.

Critical Access Management for Financial Organizations

Critical access management helps financial IT and compliance teams meet these unique challenges and secure critical systems and data with solutions to govern, control, and monitor access. It implements controls to meet regulatory requirements, such as SOX 404 and the GLBA Safeguards Rule. It also allows financial organizations to address access vulnerabilities to critical systems by securing third-party access and preventing access creep — both especially high security risks given the consequences of breached financial or customer NPI data. Not only do these solutions complement existing security solutions with a focus on data breach prevention, but they also bring needed ease and efficiency to a formerly laborious and manual process.