How security can directly impact the bottom line at banks, financial institutions

Banks and financial institutions have long recognized the critical need to secure the valuable and sensitive financial assets their customers trust to keep them safe. That’s why the vast majority of these organizations have invested in advanced technologies to prevent lapses in security, which could negatively impact their revenues, operating costs, reputation and much more.

Financial organizations certainly recognize that these technologies impact their bottom line, but calculating the precise ROI of preventive solutions can be difficult. As a result, security is often viewed simply as a cost center. However, security has a valuable and untapped role to play that can deliver immediate tangible results across the entire organization – while using many of the security technologies already deployed.

The transformation and expanded role of security can best be seen in its potential to contribute via technology to four additional key business operations: reducing inefficiencies in processes and procedures, predictive analysis, delivering actionable data and reports and achieving compliance. These tasks are often performed with time-consuming, costly and error-prone manual processes. Security technology can substantially reduce these inefficiencies through automation that leverages data generated by diverse systems.

Improved Efficiency

The most effective tool for creating efficiencies in processes through automation is Physical Access and Identity Management (PIAM) software. These solutions capture, store and analyze data from multiple disparate security and non-security systems to create reports that will not only help security build a business case but also deliver actionable intelligence about threats, potential cost savings and more.

Compliance

Financial institutions are governed by industry and government regulations, each of which carries its own specific set of requirements that must be met and with which they must regularly demonstrate compliance. This exhaustive process requires data to be gathered, correlated, analyzed and reported from multiple systems, often manually. With much of this data stored in siloed systems that are managed separately, the time, effort, cost and potential for errors associated with these manual processes is a primary pain point for financial institutions. At the same time, non-compliance is simply not an option.

A key benefit of PIAM for financial institutions is the ability to automatically pull compliance-related information from security data on a regular basis and generate reports to demonstrate compliance with each of the regulations governing their operations. In addition to significantly reducing the time and effort associated with manual tasks, by ensuring minimal human intervention PIAM can eliminate potential errors that can place compliance in jeopardy.

Predictive Analysis

For banks and financial institutions, security risks are not limited to those posed by visitors, contractors or other outsiders. They are also vulnerable to insider threat, which is a growing problem across all industries. So these organizations must focus simultaneously on vulnerabilities from both internal and external individuals.

However, insider threat is often difficult to detect, particularly when security and other tasks are performed manually. For starters, no two insider thefts, breaches or attacks are identical, and the complex psychology behind these actions can be difficult to understand, much less prevent or mitigate. A second point is that insider threats are not always obvious or destructive but can still be damaging in some way. It might be something as simple as an employee deleting emails prior or taking customer lists with them when leaving their job.

The keys to addressing insider threats are prevention, detection and response. Prevention requires proactive measures such as employee training about company policies and procedures designed to avert threats. Detection requires a combination of strong policies and procedures, measurable goals and metrics and active monitoring. For example, tracking credential usage for patterns that fall outside of the norm can raise red flags. When this information is correlated with data from other systems for analysis, the resulting intelligence could indicate a potential insider threat. This more complete picture of incidents or potential incidents will largely dictate what the response should be.

When configured with organizational rules, policies and procedures, PIAM solutions can perform this predictive analysis automatically, enabling faster resolution and in many cases allowing security take proactive steps to avoid the threat altogether.

Asset tracking

As noted earlier, banks and financial institutions are entrusted with valuable and potentially sensitive assets. Protecting these assets is paramount to security. Another critical aspect is managing and tracking physical security assets like badges, keys, smart cards, parking permits and others. At any given time, security personnel must be able to pinpoint who has these assets and for how long they have been assigned to that person.

A PIAM solution allows security to centrally manage the issuance and tracking of these items and automate policy-based workflows for their renewal. Each asset is associated with a specific identity and can be tracked throughout that identity’s lifecycle. When an identity expires, it is immediately deactivated along with any associated credentials, PIN codes or passwords. Identity and asset management plays a key role in complying with regulations, and PIAM leverages the usability and functionality of all systems within a financial institutions to provide the necessary data to ensure the timely, accurate and comprehensive compliance reporting and resolution that is so critical to these organizations.

Financial institutions have long focused on technology for securing people, places and assets. However, this narrow focus on protection limits security departments’ potential contribution to organizations, doing little to impact overall operations. By deploying tools like PIAM solutions that can automate formerly time-consuming, costly and error-prone processes, security can deliver significant operational efficiencies that demonstrate a positive, measurable impact on the bottom line. These efficiencies also strengthen and streamline the asset-tracking and compliance processes while improving security by generating actionable intelligence that can be used to prevent insider threat and other incidents before they can occur. All these factors help security make the critical leap from traditionally-reactive cost center to a proactive strategic business partner. An added plus is that the above goals and actions are not limited to banks and financial institutions, but can be applied across multiple vertical markets, expanding potential opportunities for security professionals.

About the Author: Don Campbell is the vice president of products for Quantum Secure.