• Candida Valois, field CTO at Scality


• 15.12.2022 06:15 am
#digitaltransformation #ransomware

The financial services sector is grappling with an immense number of challenges – some unique to the industry, others more universal. Challenges include:

Ongoing digital transformation – The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the move to the cloud and other digital transformation efforts as organizations sought to be able to support remote work and remote services rapidly

Ransomware and other cybersecurity threats – The cybersecurity onslaught is non-stop, especially for a sector like financial services that has so much sensitive data. They’re also grappling with security requirements and other regulations.

Legacy IT infrastructure – this one is true across many sectors, and it continues to be a significant issue.

Object storage can help address these challenges. Let’s get an overview of the threat landscape and see where object storage comes in.

The fast pace of digital transformation

The pandemic accelerated digital transformation initiatives; Deloitte's in-house study of financial services companies found in the summer of 2020 that 49% of respondents stated COVID-19 caused their companies to accelerate their digital transformation efforts.

This has been a significant development for financial institutions, because now customers are expecting a highly digital banking experience. As a bank or other financial institution, you must be able to provide that experience while at the same time abiding by security and banking regulations.

Cyber threats and compliance

Financial services institutions have vast troves of customers’ personal information, some of which needs to be saved and protected for a long time. As an organisation collecting personal data, you have a duty to keep it safe – even as security risks proliferate.

And proliferate they do; ransomware isn’t an if but a when. In 2021, 55% of financial service firms were victims of at least one ransomware attack, up from 34% the previous year. That’s according to Sophos and Vanson Bourne in The State of Ransomware in Financial Services 2022.

Legacy IT infrastructure and limited budgets

Even as digital transformation efforts continue, many financial services companies are still dealing with legacy IT. Sadly, as Deloitte points out, current core banking systems and applications haven't been optimised to benefit from new technology and application management techniques due to years of underinvestment. They can't possibly meet the market's increasing expectations and could soon put banks at more risk and liability.

Additionally, due to the tiny and declining pool of professionals with the technical and institutional knowledge to maintain core systems created for a bygone age, operation and maintenance of those legacy systems are becoming increasingly challenging and expensive.

Limited IT budgets also continue to be a concern for most companies. They’re trying to address all these problems with a limited IT budget—not to mention compliance concerns and the regulatory reporting process they must follow. That’s another challenge.

Finding the right storage solution

When it comes to finding the right storage solution to address these issues, scalability is an important criterion to look at. You need a solution that can handle your present and future needs, with the ability to affordably store data for the long term.

To eliminate silos and promote rapid innovation, you need a secure, affordable solution that can scale as business needs change over the next five to ten years. This solution should make data accessible to both your legacy applications and your new cloud/cloud-native applications. A solution that combines the benefits of public cloud with the performance, control and security benefits of on-premises private cloud infrastructure is ideal. To prevent data from being unavailable, corrupted, overwritten, accidentally changed, lost, erased or — as in the case of ransomware attacks — encrypted against your will, the ideal solution includes numerous layers of protection.

Next-generation cloud storage for data centres offers an impressive fusion of safety, speed and scale. It is flexible, simple to control, and immutable. In the fight against ransomware, immutability is universally acknowledged as essential, but it also effectively protects data from any deletion or change (either intentionally malicious or accidental). With the lowest possible recovery point objective/recovery time goal (RPO/RTO), immutability is a watertight solution for preventing and recovering from ransomware attacks as well as other security events.

Better storage in the new year

Financial services firms are simultaneously dealing with rapid digital transformation, legacy IT infrastructure, and ransomware and other cybersecurity issues. FSIs also must meet rigorous compliance standards, making sure all company data is securely stored. Years of budgetary neglect have made these issues more difficult. One element that will help is next-generation cloud storage, which provides the necessary scalability and speed – as well as data security. Today’s object storage makes a good partner for FSIs and the many challenges they face.