Executives in the financial services sector* know that a strong cybersecurity posture contributes to business growth. Cybersecurity directly impacts availability and uptime, which improves customer trust, and it enables faster software innovation by refocusing the IT teams' attention on more strategic projects. Plus, compliance with specific frameworks provides concrete proof of security to external stakeholders, partners, and prospects, ultimately making them more willing and likely to work with that business.
To build a strong cybersecurity posture that contributes to business growth, financial services organizations need cybersecurity technology that enables business continuity, improves productivity, and helps organizations meet compliance requirements. Here are three ways Blumira helps modern financial organizations achieve broad business goals through strong cybersecurity.
Continuity is essential to conducting business operations and fueling consumer trust, which is already hard to come by in the financial services sector.
According to the most recent Edelman Trust Barometer, financial services is one of the least trusted industry sectors in the world. It’s not a surprising statistic. After all, the financial services sector also tends to deal with more security incidents—like DDoS or Ransomware attacks—than other sectors. These incidents can cause system downtime and make critical systems unavailable to users.
Financial institutions can improve trust by efficiently mitigating threats and ensuring that valuable customer resources such as payment portals and online banking options are readily available whenever users need them.
Mitigating threats that pose a risk to business continuity requires a proactive approach that includes continuous threat monitoring and automated response mechanisms. By swiftly blocking access to their network upon detecting threats, organizations can effectively thwart lateral movement and prevent the spread of breaches. Blumira offers functionalities to support this proactive defense strategy, including the Blumira Agent, which delivers endpoint visibility and facilitates host isolation, promptly cutting off access to the network upon detection of an endpoint threat.
Blumira’s Automated Blocking feature for Dynamic Blocklists also enables proactive mitigation by seamlessly integrating with major firewalls to block malicious source IPs or domains, fortifying the organization's defense posture. And with over 50 integrations spanning on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, Blumira provides comprehensive coverage, empowering organizations to proactively safeguard against threats and ensure uninterrupted business operations2.
In financial services, staying on top of security incidents is crucial. However, with the sheer volume of alerts flooding in, it's easy for teams to feel overwhelmed. This hampers productivity and poses a significant challenge in effectively managing security threats.
Teams may spend most of their time finding, analyzing, and responding to threats instead of focusing on product innovation, customer retention, or customer satisfaction. Improper threat prioritization can also decrease productivity, sending teams on a wild goose chase researching and responding to alerts with a small business impact versus those with a more significant business impact.
To combat the challenges posed by alert overload, financial services organizations require a cybersecurity solution that goes beyond mere alert management. The right cybersecurity solution will improve productivity by helping users prioritize issues based on severity and business impact, decreasing an organization’s reliance on manual remediation.
Blumira's solution offers filtered alerts, which reduce false positives and limit all the noise that leads to alert fatigue. This allows teams to focus where it matters most without being inundated by irrelevant alerts. Blumira also offers intelligent prioritization, leveraging pre-built rules to prioritize findings based on severity and business impact. Blumira categorizes threats to determine the urgency of response, helping teams efficiently allocate resources and address high-priority issues first.
Blumira's other standout feature for financial services organizations is its security playbooks, which offer guided remediation for identified threats. These playbooks streamline the response process, saving teams the time and effort of developing response plans from scratch.
Compliance is a significant driver of cybersecurity investments for financial services organizations, given the stringent regulations imposed by frameworks like PCI DSS and FFIEC. Remaining compliant helps financial services organizations build a strong reputation of trust among partners and customers and shield themselves from hefty fines.
The best cybersecurity tools for financial services organizations help them meet critical compliance requirements related to safeguarding systems, protecting customer data, and promptly reporting and responding to security incidents.
Blumira offers functionalities tailored to address these compliance needs efficiently: Automated audit trails and logging capabilities ensure adherence to FFIEC and other frameworks while retaining a year's worth of audit log history satisfy PCI compliance requirements. Additionally, scheduled and automated reports streamline auditor inquiries, ensuring seamless compliance management for financial services entities.
Blumira helps financial services organizations like SouthTrust Bank thrive by reducing the complexity of cybersecurity and compliance. Partnering with Blumira, SouthTrust Bank met NIST and PCI DSS compliance regulations and effectively reduced security risks without scaling their small team or going over budget.
With Blumira, financial services organizations benefit from:
Looking for a cybersecurity solution to push your financial services organization forward? Sign up for a free trial of Blumira today.
*https://deloitte.wsj.com/cio/cybersecurity-budgets-benchmarks-for-financial-services-72924cb6