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One of financial institutions’ biggest concerns when considering digital tools is verifying data remains secure.
One of financial institutions’ biggest concerns when considering digital tools such as artificial intelligence, automation, or data platforms is verifying your institution and customer data remain secure. The trust needed with your vendors and platforms require much more diligence, awareness, and monitoring than when you favored an on-premises infrastructure where your team managed the controls, patching, user access, provisioning, and configuration.
Understanding your digital tools
If you don't fully understand automation, AI, data flow, and processes, can you effectively monitor and provide safety, or are you blindly trusting your third and fourth-party vendors to do it? It’s crucial to have a clear understanding of how these technologies work and where your data is being processed, stored, and accessed.
Learning from incidents
Often when we hear about an incident at a financial institution there are lessons to learn. These incidents can serve as a call to action to verify your institution wouldn't have been impacted by the same attack or identify a gap to address.
While human error will always be high root cause risk, you can control how high that risk is by enhancing your controls and tools. Essential measures include:
- Complex passwords,
- Multi-factor authentication,
- Data segregation,
- Network segmentation,
- Regular backups,
- Endpoint protection,
- Email security,
- Intrusion detection and prevention systems,
- Patch management, and
- User training.
Assessing your IT team's skills
Inventory your IT team’s skills and measure them against your infrastructure, cybersecurity, and risk management needs. If you have a managed service provider, assess their skills and how they stay ahead of ever-increasing effectiveness of cyber threats. The harsh reality in today's financial services ecosystem is the skills required to maintain your hardware and software are different from those needed to effectively stay ahead of cyber threats for your institution and your customers.
Actionable steps
Here are some steps you can take now to enhance your data privacy:
- Update your vendor management program — Ask your vendors if they are leveraging AI or automation as part of your vendor review process. Start with critical and high-risk vendors first.
- Identify fourth-party vendors — These are vendors your third-party vendors use. Understanding this extended network is crucial for comprehensive security.
- Update your infrastructure topology map — Include on-premises devices, remote connection configurations (outside of WAN), data flow, data classification, user access control, vendor connections, internet connectivity, redundancy/backup, and network/cybersecurity management tools.
- Create an AI and automation policy — Whether you are ready to integrate AI, automation, or other digital tools at your institution or not, starting with an AI and automation policy will help regulators know you have identified the risks presented through your vendors and through the availability of publicly facing AI and digital tools available to your employees.
By taking these steps, you can better manage the complexities of data privacy in a digital world and verify your institution and customer data remain secure throughout your digital journey and maturity.
How CLA can help with cybersecurity for financial institutions
Whether you are looking to learn more or have questions specific to your institution, check out more on how our CLA cybersecurity team can be your trusted advisor as you continue to mature. Our cyber teams are focused on the regulatory and compliance landscape of the industry so know the necessary steps to take to help protect your institution and your customers.
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