Secure multi-cloud networking in financial services is not a myth
In the ever-evolving landscape of financial services, organizations are increasingly thrust into the forefront of innovation, compelled by mergers, partnerships, and the imperative of meeting account holder engagement requirements. This drive has led many of them to embrace multi-cloud strategies as a cornerstone of their operations. According to a recent survey by F5, a staggering 71% of financial services organizations have embraced multi-cloud approaches to meet their diverse needs. Unfortunately, the increased complexity that often comes with properly managing multi-cloud environments can demand extra resources and attention. To compound the situation, building and maintaining a consistent security posture across their application and API portfolios in a distributed environment is an increasing challenge for security teams, where the cost of a data breach is $5.9 million on average in financial services.
Financial services institutions are also adapting to evolving open finance ecosystems, with 90% planning to integrate fintechs into their digital banking platforms, as per a recent Jack Henry study. That adds up to many new third-party provider API connections to secure and maintain, including data-intensive aggregators.
On a positive note, public cloud providers offer native networking and security capabilities that suffice for many use cases in multi-cloud environments, but notable gaps do exist. For example, when your apps get scaled across environments it can ultimately lead to both having less granular control over your portfolio performance and a lack of ability to manage consistent security policies across different cloud providers. To fill these “mythological” gaps, technology leaders are turning to new Secure Multi-cloud Networking Services (SMNS). This signifies a paradigm shift in how financial services can utilize innovative solutions to greatly enhance their application delivery and security capabilities in a multi-cloud era.
Simplifying multi-cloud networking complexity
As financial services organizations expand and scale applications across clouds, there’s a risk of increasing complexity, losing visibility, and ultimately having less granular control over the portfolio. In fact, nine of 10 organizations report multi-cloud challenges, including complexity of tools/APIs.
SMNS are emerging as the strategic preference for leaders in financial services technology seeking to simplify the complexities associated with multi-cloud management. With better simplification, like an API-first infrastructure solution that offer a unified interface, financial services institutions gain more control over their entire application stack with solutions that are platform-independent and better enable policy consistency and remediation through automation.
Why enhanced security streamlining is essential in the multi-cloud age
Legacy security solutions are struggling to keep up in the multi-cloud era. In a Cybersecurity Insiders report, 78% say traditional security solutions don’t work for the cloud. To put it simply, financial services risk teams need agile tools that work in any environment and that simplify their user experience so they can focus on stopping threats across their distributed architecture.
The adoption of SMNS simplifies the implementation of security by providing end-to-end, cloud-based centralized management of security policies across distributed environments. For example, when you need to build exclusions, like a specific false positive, you can easily deploy this consistently from a central console. You can also, for instance, streamline the consistent use of your API reputation filter, a task that’s especially helpful to better manage aggregator API endpoints. These examples along with many other associated ones, allow for an improved, detailed focus on application and API security in financial services, enabling organizations to meet multi-cloud security challenges with greater consistency and agility.
A multi-layered security framework essential for safeguarding applications across all environments
As multi-cloud strategies become the norm, adopting a layered security architecture is imperative to fortifying defenses and ensuring comprehensive and consistent protection in any environment. As detailed above, a crucial aspect of a layered security architecture is the incorporation of consistent security policies, like remediating the critical log4j2 vulnerability consistently across all environments/IT stacks.
This is especially important in the financial services industry, with the evolving complexities associated with growing open finance ecosystems. Embedded finance and banking as a service innovations, for example, are changing the landscape with almost 50% of financial institutions planning to embed their financial services into third parties in the next two years.
With the right SMNS in place, financial services organizations can more confidently navigate the complexities of distributed environments and open finance ecosystems, with greater visibility and streamlined security operations, mitigating the risk of the loss of sensitive PII and financial data.
Comprehensive visibility is key for improved insights across cloud environments
One of the significant advantages of incorporating strong security elements that are designed for multi-cloud networks is the facilitation of end-to-end visibility. As mentioned already, this visibility is crucial for financial services organizations aiming to maintain control over their applications and data across distributed cloud environments.
SMNS can provide insights into the entire infrastructure, allowing for proactive monitoring, threat detection, and automated protection. Additionally, this end-to-end visibility allows you to review the consistent deployment and operations of application performance and security in one-place. Gone will be the days of monotonously mulling through application security and performance analytics of multiple tools within multiple environments for all your different applications.
The future of financial services lies in embracing innovation
As financial services organizations tackle the intricacies of multi-cloud strategies, embracing SMNS becomes a crucial strategic necessity. By seamlessly integrating with all distributed environments and incorporating strong security elements, financial services organizations can not only bridge existing potential manually caused security gaps, but also elevate their operational efficiency. The future of financial services lies in embracing innovative solutions that prioritize security, and secure multi-cloud networking stands as a transformative force in the evolving financial services digital landscape.
Learn more by watching our on-demand webinar titled, Securing Apps in Distributed Environments.
