• Viet Tang, Senior Sales Engineer at Genetec


• 01.07.2022 04:45 pm
#cloud

Financial institutions commonly face a range of IT-related challenges. These range from an ever-changing threat landscape to a lack of IT resources and shrinking budgets. These challenges are often heightened because of siloed technology and processes. 

Many organisations still rely upon disparate legacy systems that were designed to meet the specific needs of distinct branches or departments. Some have over 1,000 different applications in place in their networks. These legacy tools and the siloes they create make it more difficult for banks to protect themselves.

Breaking down siloes

To address existing and future challenges, banks need to think about the foundation of their physical security system instead of implementing short-term solutions. They also need to consider their system’s ability to evolve to meet future security and operational needs.

Their security system of choice should help break down siloes—not replicate them. Simply integrating new tools does not break down a siloed approach to working as security teams still have to jump between systems. To overcome this, a hybrid approach should be adopted that unifies systems and leverages the cloud. 

A unified hybrid-cloud infrastructure

Without careful planning, the drive to modernise a network infrastructure can expose banks to new risks. Network infrastructure is the backbone of any security system and helps protect against external threats.  So, ahead of migrating to a unified security system, banks must develop a comprehensive plan. 

Adding new devices to a security system can make banks vulnerable to cyberattacks. For this reason, they need solutions that support end-to-end security and privacy by design. In addition, they should also be looking for solutions that can be deployed in the cloud. Adopting a cloud-based infrastructure makes it easier to centralise the monitoring and management of security and operations. When paired with a unified platform it becomes much easier to function with efficiency and intelligence. 

For example, the unification of video surveillance, access control and analytics in a single interface brings visibility and control. Security personnel can receive alarms alongside live video and quickly validate if an incident requires a response without jumping between multiple systems. Banks can also ensure consistent, fast, and effective responses to threats. By using standard operating procedures they can guide security teams through incidents in real-time. 

Core benefits 

For banks, data-driven intelligence is crucial for improving investigations and the customer experience. Working with a hybrid-cloud infrastructure and cloud-based solutions with built-in analytics makes accessing and correlating data from multiple systems easier. And this means increased security and greater insight. 

Since a unified platform can automatically associate video and other data streams, it reduces the time necessary to find and correlate information and eliminates human error. Then, together with a cloud-based evidence management solution, a unified platform can help security personnel and law enforcement during a post-event investigation by providing a central touchpoint for investigations. 

In addition to simplifying investigations by making it easy to manage and review videos and share encrypted files with law enforcement, an evidence management solution also reduces the costs inherent to copying evidence to DVDs. Because it can search through and correlate video feeds and other data from all branches and corporate facilities, banks can use a cloud-based evidence management system to simplify the evidentiary process when multiple locations are involved.

Deriving insights that can enhance the customer experience is another advantage of migrating to a hybrid-cloud infrastructure. This can include seeing how many people are visiting a location at any given time, determining how long customers are waiting in a queue, and how foot traffic is moving through different environments.  

When large-scale banks have access to their security data, they can implement organisational and staffing strategies that reduce wait times and ease the flow of people through branches. Ultimately, unlocking this information helps banks stay ahead of the competition.

Conclusion

Banks need to look at their security systems as more than just a collection of tools. Instead, they have to recognise them as a way to improve operations and access greater insight. Getting there takes careful consideration and requires a hybrid approach. Ultimately that is underpinned by unifying systems and embracing the cloud.