Here’s how organisations can safeguard their businesses for the future

Given the current landscape, what do you see as the top threats faced by banking and financial sectors? What can they do to better protect themselves?

The threats facing the current landscape can be broken down into four primary threats, which are distinct, but interconnected. The first is protecting data from both malicious attacks and from accidental mistakes by employees. A vital aspect of this approach is to redefine how you think about your security, moving away from thinking of creating a wall around your data and focusing on protecting the data itself.

The second challenge is that of regulation. While regulatory mandates drive a lot of the data protection activity, it is dangerous to just do this as a check box exercise. The focus should be on understanding what the regulation is trying to achieve and formulating an approach that meets not just the letter of the law, but the spirit of it as well.
The third challenge is the rapidly changing technological landscape. While cloud adoption is relatively mainstream and provides an opportunity to be more agile and scale better, but it is also an opportunity to lose data if mindsets don’t change. Financial institutions need to be developing strategies that set out how they plan to deal with blockchain and cryptocurrencies and establish a post-quantum encryption posture.

Last – but not the least – is the rise of the new entries into the financial world like neobanks. These institutions typically don’t have the legacy systems or physical overheads of their traditional counterparts, which enables them to be more agile and dynamic, but equally they sometimes don’t have the charter or compliance to offer a complete set of financial services. For these challenger banks it’s imperative that they can demonstrate the highest levels of security to build customer trust, while traditional banks need to update their processes and capabilities with features like instant card issuance and modern applications to retain customer loyalty.

How is Entrust helping its customers secure identities, payments and data?

Entrust core technology represents the building blocks of trust: managing IDs and credentials, authenticating users, ID proofing bound to credentials, physical access management, encrypting data and managing security policy. Now, more than ever, customers can turn to Entrust for solutions, for key use cases that enable digital transformation with security and identity – from certificate lifecycle management and identity and access management to digital signing workflows and seamless travel solutions.

How does Entrust help organisations deploy safe and secure vaccine credentials and passport programmes?

The digital enabling technologies already exist to ensure both powerful data security and minimal check-in disruption. Let’s take a closer look at a few of the encryption and authentication tools vaccine passport initiatives currently have at their disposal.

Digital signatures: Enabled by proven public key infrastructure (PKI) technology, these can be deployed within a person’s mobile device or a physical smart card to securely identify the individual and validate their documentation.

Digital identity proofing: Mobile-based identity proofing tools empower ID solutions to integrate ID verification into a streamlined mobile experience.

Multi-factor authentication: Confirms user authenticity with a range of different secondary authenticators – such as OATH tokens, mobile push, OTP, biometrics, and more.

Adaptive risk-based authentication: Each time users request access; the access context is automatically assessed in real time by machine learning policy engines created to notice subtle irregularities in contextual attributes – such as biometrics and device reputation.

Hardware security modules: This tamper-resistant cryptographic hardware provides a strong root of trust to keep encryption keys secure.

With 2022 only a few months away, what is in for customers when it comes to safeguarding their businesses for the future?

As we start to find ways to navigate the ‘new normal’, many people are starting to return to their offices as new working routines are being outlined. With many organisations considering a more permanent approach their hybrid/distributed workforce, the coming months are the ideal time to examine the ‘bubblegum and duct tape’ that was needed by IT teams to keep their respective organisation’s functioning and take stock of how to more robustly and securely manage their IT workforce going forward.