Scaling Down the Surface of Exposure

The 2020 pandemic and cloud adoption have at least one thing in common – both have led to an increased digital surface of exposure and added difficulty in keeping track of risks.  Ten years back, our customers in the financial services industry were already facing the need to protect devices connected to unsecured external networks. SwissLife in France had the vision to implement adaptive security to enable secure remote working and shield data from undetected network infiltrations.

Now, as you amass more and more cloud-driven apps and see unprecedented acceleration in access to your systems from anywhere and everywhere, effective cybersecurity can seem like a daunting remit. Cloud providers are not responsible for your users’ data – you are. Forcepoint advises large banks migrating to cloud services to adopt a Zero Trust Security approach to decrease the surface of vulnerability. You can do this by controlling access to apps, to data and to data usage. Read how the UK’s Metro Bank colleagues can now securely access Office 365 and Yammer off-site, using Forcepoint for visibility and control to fully leverage the potential of cloud applications and increase productivity and collaboration across all devices.

That Small Crack in the Wall

Whether you provide banking, payment or insurance services, your landscape is composed of IT vendors and service organisations you implicitly trust – even though they come from the outside. In the webcast mentioned earlier, Natwest International Markets CISO Ashton D’Cruz stressed the importance of understanding inter-dependencies and extending your responsibility across your supply chain, your partners and your stakeholders. The largest enterprises unfailingly fall victim to that tiny unscrutinized crack in the ecosystem every hacker is on the lookout for!  

Watching over data also means knowing what happens inside systems, while balancing data security and compliance requirements. A Turkish high-profile financial institution, QNB Finansbank, serves millions of customers and is responsible for hundreds of billions of assets. After deploying Forcepoint DLP, the bank was able to achieve a more detailed, comprehensive look at how its 12,000 employees—across retail branches, operations, and corporate headquarters—access and interact with sensitive information. Becoming more attuned to how people and data interact enabled Finansbank to better address both inbound and outbound data vulnerabilities.

Models of Resilience

We publish a plethora of customer insights, both named and anonymous, that illustrate how banks and financial services successfully address risk governance. They represent a small fraction of EMEA customers who belong to an industry that obviously prioritizes cybersecurity and continuously works to earn trust. You can learn more about cyber resilience and  the path to Zero Trust from this e-book, also available in French, German, Italian and Turkish.