Financial firms continue their leadership in cybersecurity risk with the adoption of microsegmentation strategies. Real-time threat identification and containment deliver essential capabilities in managing ransomware, crypto and cyber risks, and regulatory penalties.
Financial institutions are at the forefront of the cybersecurity wars. As a leading target for identity theft, ransomware, and digital currency hacking, as well as a major economic pillar, finance institutions have faced a 200%+ increase in ransomware attacks and a 300%+ increase in crypto-based attacks - in the last 4 years alone. Major brands impacted have included Capital One, Charles Schwab, BlockFi, Western Union, and more.
Leading most other industries in frequency of attacks, finance institutions also contend with some of the highest cost of breaches from immediate and secondary losses. The financial services industry will remain a prime target for attacks due to the high value of its assets and data. A breach in a financial institution does not just compromise individual accounts; it can result in substantial financial loss, reputational damage, and regulatory penalties.
Finance institutions have some of the most robust cybersecurity strategies for this reason - with significant investment in response plans, testing, and training. While finance institutions have made substantive investments in supportive infrastructure, the myriad of financial applications utilized across and between institutions, investor groups, and customers present a dynamic challenge in keeping application vulnerabilities at bay for cyber attackers to gain entry for lateral attacks.
For a hacker, a single vulnerability can compromise an entire network in minutes, exposing sensitive customer data and risking substantial financial loss. Even with leading infrastructure, the size and scale of financial institutions’ technology ecosystem can lead to detection and containment delays that run from weeks to months.
Enter microsegmentation—a critical cybersecurity strategy adopted by many leading banks, insurance, and payment services companies to enhance security at a granular level, helping financial institutions safeguard their ecosystems against emerging threats.
Microsegmentation divides a network into isolated segments to control traffic between workloads. Instead of relying on traditional perimeter security (e.g. firewalls at network entry points), microsegmentation operates on a workload basis. Each segment has unique security policies, meaning that if a hacker breaches one segment, they will still face robust automated defenses before they can gain additional lateral access. Microsegmentation creates greater control across the IT ecosystem - a precision over who has access to what - down to the specific application, user, or data workload.
Many financial sectors operate at the leading edge of digital transformation, building, adapting and deploying a myriad of financial products, interfaces, and other access points that expand the ‘attack surface’ of threats. Microsegmentation is an integral part of a cybersecurity strategy as a result - the more segmentation controls, the better the odds are to introduce automated limits to lateral movement across a network. In other words, even if there is a breach, an attacker can be confined to that segment alone, unable to pivot or escalate the attack across the network.
Some financial institutions also face the need for the latest protective layers, and concurrently face scaling issues with cyber training costs, plus keeping legacy systems up-to-date with the latest compliance standards.
For example, credit unions frequently have limited resource capability to keep up to speed with cybersecurity threats or compliance updates. Microsegmentation allows credit unions to keep up to date on both security and compliance with centralized segmentation controls, without the necessity of costly resource additions and/or legacy system customization.
Reduce the Attack Surface / Segmentation: The principal value of microsegmentation lies in its ability to remove unnecessary connection points, particularly to external entry points, and isolate breaches in segmented zones.
Ensure Compliance with Less Training Cycles: Financial institutions are bound by strict compliance requirements, such as PCI-DSS for payment cards, which demands solutions for strong access controls and data segregation. Microsegmentation helps companies meet these standards by providing documented, verifiable security zones, streamlining audits, and simplifying compliance.
Improved Visibility and Monitoring: Microsegmentation provides detailed visibility into application flows and network traffic. By monitoring each microsegment individually, security teams can detect unusual behavior and respond in real time.
Agility for Cloud and Hybrid Environments: Many credit unions and financial institutions are adopting hybrid cloud models, where applications and data are spread across cloud and on-premise infrastructure. Microsegmentation creates a unified security layer across both, allowing security policies to move seamlessly with the workloads.
Scalability: Based in the cloud, microsegmentation can evolve with the organization’s infrastructure and scaling security needs.
1. Build a Cross-Functional Security Team to Assess Your Network and IT Roadmap: Bring together security, IT, compliance, and clinical staff to ensure the microsegmentation strategy aligns with the unique demands of finance workflows. Identify and map all assets, devices, and applications within your network to understand where sensitive data resides. Understand how current IT roadmap initiatives such as IOT/Edge Computing may impact your device, user access, and read/write strategies.
2. Prioritize High-Risk Assets Based on Threat Sensitivity: Identify and classify critical interfaces, databases and data types to prioritize protection efforts. Identify segmentation points for the most critical parts of the network to quickly protect high-value data.
3. Start Small and Expand Gradually: Select tools that integrate with your architecture. Progressively expand to expand critical environments.
4. Leverage Automated Monitoring and Reporting: Automated monitoring tools help finance organizations identify breaches, unusual data movement, and compliance violations in real time, enabling rapid responses to incidents. Integrate automation tools that can enforce Zero Trust by dynamically verifying permissions, reducing the risk of human error. Develop automated reporting, including breaches across user roles, data sensitivity and compliance standards.
5. Ensure Integration with Broader Security Tools: Ensure that microsegmentation integrates with other security solutions such as firewalls, intrusion detection, and SIEM systems for seamless protection.
6. Train Staff on Incident Response Plan: Even the best security protocols can face unexpected breaches. Develop a well-defined response plan that details the steps to isolate, contain, and mitigate threats. Monitor and ensure proper guidelines are followed for data breach response.
7. Build in Regular Compliance Audits and Segmentation Adjustments; Maintain System Performance: Conduct regular tests to ensure autonomous responses are effective, without unintended consequences. Continuously monitor segmented areas for unusual activity, and regularly update segmentation controls to meet compliance standards, and address emerging threats. Security leaders should work closely with operations teams to sustain operational performance, balancing security and usability.
Selecting the right vendor is critical, as it determines the quality of the journey taken in developing the right security, scalability, and compliance capabilities of the microsegmentation strategy. Here are critical factors to consider in choosing the right vendor:
Experience in Financial Security: Look for vendors with proven experience in financial IT security, who will be better prepared to understand the data, application, and workflow implications of finance-specific challenges, from large datasets to access-point risks.
Expertise in Compliance: Ensure that the vendor is well-versed in regulations and executive order guidance, offering supplemental compliance tools to microsegmentation monitoring.
Compatibility with Existing Infrastructure: The ideal vendor should offer solutions compatible with the current IT environment, offering cost-benefit analysis for complex legacy IT solution considerations.
Scalability: As technology advances, so do security implications. Choose a vendor whose microsegmentation solutions are reflective of the flexibility required to support and scale with the organization’s evolving IT ecosystem offerings.
Tailored Automation and Analytics: Many vendors offer advanced automation features, such as automatic policy updates and real-time analytics, but lack customization experience with the nuances of finance operations and user interactions. Only environment-aligned capabilities allow for meaningful insight in anticipating, modeling and assessing the impact and response strategy to emerging security threats.
24/7 Support and Incident Response Customer Service: Financial institutions are a global target, and a threat can arise at any time. A vendor with round-the-clock support and fast incident response services can help ensure microsegmentation closes the gap from identification to threat elimination.
Transparent Pricing and Long-Term Value: Transparent vendors provide a clear breakdown of costs, including setup, ongoing support, and scaling. Long-term planning is crucial for building trust - prioritize vendors that are able to define clear improvements in KPIs to create measurable ROI for your organization’s microsegmentation strategy.
For a look at microsegmentation vendors we recommend, check out our post here.
Microsegmentation helps financial institutions address cybersecurity risks across a rapidly evolving data and applications landscape with granular, flexible security controls across the IT ecosystem. In addition, centralized microsegment controls allow for rapid compliance updates and deployment of Zero Trust processes, reducing infrastructure updates and training needs to keep systems current and in alignment.
With the right microsegmentation strategy, vendor partner and ongoing monitoring, financial institutions can safeguard confidential data, reduce risk, and adapt to evolving regulatory standards, creating a safer and more consistently protected environment for employees, customers, and financial ecosystem partners.
The microsegmentation journey needs a strong journey partner to help determine where and how to begin. As a trusted advisor to hundreds of companies in solving their most complex technology and cyber issues, we welcome the opportunity to help you organize your strategic discussions, co-facilitate microsegmentation exploration workshops, and bring our advising capabilities to the table to optimize planning in any stage of the security journey.
Ready to take your organization’s defense to the next level? Contact us today to develop your strategy and chat about harnessing the power of microsegmentation for your financial institution.