After years of sustained, sophisticated attacks by a range of threat actors, financial services leaders are under no illusions that they need robust cyber defences. At the same time, they are also seeking to capitalise on the latest cloud technologies to ensure competitive advantage, with personalised banking apps, algorithmic underwriting, and quant trading all revolutionising their respective sectors.

Data is the new currency of success for the financial sector - and hackers are coming for it. Whether to hold it ransom, sell it on or to use it to undertake further attacks, data is the object of their efforts. It needs the utmost protection.

To protect any asset, you need to know where it is, what it is - and that you even have it in the first place! However, as our recent research uncovered 96% of financial leaders acknowledged they need to improve their ability to track their entire data footprint. Just 68% have complete visibility into data stored within cloud environments. If a breach should happen, how can you ensure recovery, assess impact and build resilience without full visibility of what has been affected?

Why, then, are so many financial organisations still losing sight of this precious resource?

A shot in the dark

It is clear that without data visibility, you are shooting in the dark to protect it. The first step to ensuring high-level data security is understanding the location, type and amount of data the organisation holds. This can be achieved with the help of automated data insight tools that uncover and classify data so that there is a secure foundation to work from.

However, once data is initially uncovered, one of the most common mistakes financial organisations make when engaging in digital transformation is failing to maintain data backups, visibility and scalability. Financial organisations generate vast amounts of data in their day to day business so continued data visualisation and backup is vital, especially when it comes to recovering from a breach. 

Concerningly, however, just 26% of financial respondents said their organisation backs up its data continuously, while over a third said it is backed up less frequently than every 12 hours. Mission-critical data not backed up for 12 hours or more is at risk of permanently being lost if there is a ransomware attack or server failure.

When asked about the impact of ransomware attacks, over four in ten financial services respondents told us they had permanently or temporarily lost data, with over a third saying this had resulted in financial loss for data recovery. To put this in context, just 8% of respondents said they had not experienced a ransomware attack.

Ransomware victims are better positioned to prevent or mitigate data loss, avoid paying ransoms and minimise downtime and business disruption if they follow best practices for backup, data protection and disaster recovery. This includes measures such as having a “3- 2-1” backup strategy – one primary backup and two additional copies of their data, using at least two different storage mediums, with at least one copy offsite. Other measures include frequent disaster recovery rehearsals and comprehensive data protection for containers and even for SaaS applications.

Over-reliance on easy options

While there are best practices organisations should follow, many still rely heavily on standard backup and recovery tools from their public cloud service provider (CSP). These tools offer a false sense of security. While functional in scope and cost-effective at the outset, they offer little more than a basic level of visibility, support and protection against ransomware attacks, data theft and application outages.

Financial organisations should be made aware of the impact of relying on CSP security, backup and recovery offerings and understand precisely what they are getting - and what they are not. For example, nearly eight in ten financial IT leaders said that the current offerings from public CSPs fall short of their organisation’s security needs, with over half agreeing that relying solely on CSP backup and recovery tools puts their organisation at risk. Worryingly, however, built-in backup and recovery offerings remain the top option for the backing up of public cloud data.

While security leaders have rushed to support rapid transformation, they have turned to the seemingly easy option of using built-in backup and recovery offerings from CSPs. However, there is now recognition that these CSP backup and recovery offerings can neither scale, fully protect, nor provide a unified view of their data across all of their environments on-premises, in the cloud or virtualised. This cannot continue.

To safeguard data and be assured of ransomware resiliency, we advise financial organisations to now seek to gain complete visibility and control of all organisational data, whether held in multi, hybrid, public or private clouds, edge, or on-prem.

With many major companies announcing they have been impacted by ransomware, attacks are happening with grim regularity. It is impossible to rid all risk of attack. However, it is possible to mitigate losses, especially regarding our richest business resource - data. Now is the time for financial organisations to revisit their defence strategies and go beyond the basics to ensure that they have comprehensive data protection, backup and recovery across their IT systems, from edge to core to cloud.