Key mandates financial services firms must deliver on

While the financial services industry is no stranger to unexpected events and their repercussions, the current global upheaval is creating unprecedented uncertainty.

Faced with this, how should financial services organisations respond?

First and foremost, they must focus on providing the best possible customer experience in terms of mobile and online application availability, performance and security.

For network operations (NetOps) and information security (InfoSec) teams, this means delivering on three core mandates.

1. Deploy additional capacity and services faster than ever before

Practically overnight, NetOps and InfoSec teams have to support a vastly different network landscape than before.

They must ensure continuity and security while redeploying network resources to enable:

Increased demand for mobile banking and online services: Work-from-home has made consumers and SMB customers increasingly reliant on mobile applications and online services. In response to this, financial services organisations have to quickly ramp up capacity for their existing capabilities.

New online capabilities: At the same time, companies on a multi-year roadmap for digital transformation are condensing the plan to move up delivery of new capabilities within days or weeks as the situation evolves from work-from-home to return to work.

Work-from-home: Many financial services companies closed their customer service call centres and transitioned their staff to work-from-home. Organisations that made this switch are now considering whether this will become a permanent model, and if so, what application, security and infrastructure changes are necessary to support this model.

2. Shield the company from opportunistic cybercriminals
In this time of unprecedented change, the technology that financial services organisations and their customers depend on has never been more critical or more foundational. But with the world in flux and IT spread thin, attackers are seeing new opportunities to exploit vulnerabilities and cash in on the changes being made in response to the pandemic.

Financial services are particularly vulnerable and the current global climate is ripe for criminals ready to exploit an increased attack surface.

KPMG has also warned that cyberattacks have surged and that financial services “firms will need to shore up their cyber defences”.

3. Do it all while optimising costs amid spending constraints
To deliver security, agility and scalability in a rapidly shifting environment and optimise costs with an uncertain budget, NetOps and InfoSec teams need a solution that provides:

• Real-time visibility into all network traffic to understand and optimise performance and improve security
• Analytics to optimise and manage network performance to accommodate and secure increasing volumes of data and traffic
• A single pane of glass that simplifies network and security operations across physical, virtual and cloud environments
• Threat detection and response to find and remediate threats on the network faster and minimise disruption

Automation is key
Industry analyst group Gartner identifies improvements in visibility and agility as one of the key benefits of what it calls NetOps 2.0, a set of principles that provide “new ways to operate networks” to keep pace with digital business. The firm recommends investing in network analytics and automation to reduce friction and improve collaboration between NetOps, InfoSec and DevOps teams, leading to the reduction of manual effort and streamlined value delivery.
Adding network analytics and automation tools helps close the skills gap that exists in most organisations.

Martyn Crew is a director of solutions marketing at Gigamon