The top priority of financial services organizations, generally, is developing new products and services. Here are four key challenges to productivity that cybersecurity leaders in the financial services industry face and recommended approaches to address them:
- Replacing legacy technology. In the tightly regulated finance services and insurance industry, many are hesitant to remove or replace existing legacy technology, for fear of losing historic remediations and failing future audits due to unforeseen impacts of changes to the technology stack on overlapping or poorly documented controls. This often slows or even stalls innovation.
Tip: To get unstuck, digitize historic data, establish clear documentation, and adopt tools that enable secure coexistence between modern and legacy systems as you transition.
- Avoiding piecemeal solutions. Attempts to prevent ransomware, phishing, and other cyberattacks only add complexity that ultimately increases vulnerability. Ambitious CISOs, as well as security and network teams, understand one thing above all else: Only fundamental transformation can counter increasingly sophisticated security challenges that may compromise or even paralyze their organizations. Tip: Look to consolidate tools with unified platforms, leveraging zero-trust principles to reduce integration challenges and streamline the technology stack.
- Breaking down silos. Security network teams and fraud operations centers are typically not well integrated, creating silos and overlaps. This exacerbates security deficits and creates unrecognized risks. Tip: Foster collaboration with shared dashboards, centralized threat intelligence, and aligned workflows across security and fraud operations.
- Monitoring shadow IT. New digital assets and capabilities are sprouting in the shadows. The proliferation of applications and AI agents, coupled with a lack of observability, is leading to poor security controls. Tip: Deploy continuous monitoring solutions and artificial intelligence (AI)–driven discovery tools to identify and secure shadow applications and digital assets.
How to ensure a more resilient business
The current state of complexity is not sustainable. Jay Patty, Zscaler CTO-in-residence, advises that “harmonizing modern cybersecurity, user experience, and zero trust relies on simplicity, stripping away unnecessary complexity to reveal a clear, enforceable principle: Manage trust, verify everything, and make security seamless.”
“For many companies, the challenge is trying to visualize what the future looks like,” adds Jacky Fox, Accenture security global strategy practice lead. “It may, however, be simpler than they realize. Reducing the complexity of enterprise protection improves the overall security posture and provides resilience to withstand threats.”
Modernization may seem like an overwhelming task, particularly within organizations that have accumulated substantial technical debt through various mergers and acquisitions. Instead of attempting a wholescale effort to rip and replace the entire security architecture, organizations can adopt a step-by-step approach based on strategic priorities to ease the pain and disruption.
Start with a big-picture view to guide your network transformation to a zero-trust model, including these first steps:
- Identify critical assets. Categorize critical data and applications that must be secured.
- Assess the current environment. Identify gaps and risks; list users, devices and applications accessing network resources.
- Adopt a zero-trust philosophy. Enforce least-privilege access and verify requests for access.
- Establish a robust policy framework. Define access policies; incorporate role-based access and continuous monitoring.
- Deploy core zero-trust technologies. Replace virtual private networks (VPNs) with modern solutions such as Zero Trust Network Access. Use network traffic monitoring tools to ensure visibility across all traffic and devices.
A zero-trust approach can dramatically simplify security architecture by centralizing policy enforcement, continuously verifying users and devices, and providing integrated visibility across systems. It strengthens the digital core by reducing risk and limiting the impact of potential breaches, but it’s also a business enabler that improves agility, scalability, and overall cost-effectiveness as organizations embrace new AI and cloud-based capabilities.
Learn more about achieving cyber resilience in the financial sector through zero-trust transformation. Or read about cyber resilience in manufacturing and the public sector .