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| Data Theft Prevention for Financial Organizations |
Financial services providers need extraordinary
data
theft prevention and dependability from their
data management solutions.
More importantly, industries where governmental regulations are stringent. For
one, Jerico Pictures’ subsidiary National Public Data (NPD) is now well-known,
though not in a good way, we may say, for data security failures. USDoD listed
a cache of NPD 2.9 billion records for sale on the Dark Web, with 1.3 billion
individuals' exposed data with a sale value of $3.5 million. For this reason,
data security appliances and the best practices available continue to evolve,
yet losses attributed to
data breaches continue to outgrow data defenses.
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| Diagram depicting the difference between an IPS and an IDS | Image: paloaltonetworks.com |
Every financial organization needs robust data management
solutions to help control its exponential data evolution, adapt to fast-moving
customer needs, and comply with the ever-evolving government regulations.
Furthermore, financial organizations need to simplify their operations,
safeguard their data at scale, put up
efficient data storage, and ensure
business continuity. But even with hefty investments in
data theft prevention and security,
a lot of financial organizations found out the hard way that their present-day
intrusion
detection systems (IDS)
and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) solutions do very little to stop advanced
cyberattacks.
What is even harder is to put a price tag on the damage it
may have caused to every financial organization’s brand and reputation after
its data was breached or stolen. While many customers still have trust in their
financial institutions providing them services such as electronic payments, a simple breach on a particular
regional level or a community financial institution could lead to a devastating
effect on their businesses. Not surprisingly, every financial organization is
faced with rising costs on security and staffing just to abide by compliance.
And with it is the undeniable truth that every hour spent just focusing on
compliance is an hour that cannot be used to serve the organization’s community
or to drive profits, which, after all, is what keeps the business surviving. To
counter these worldwide problems, world leaders and governments come up with
new legislation to further protect
customer data by requiring financial
organizations to disclose earlier data breaches, in addition to the long (and
still growing) list of government regulations required of all financial
organizations. Obsessing about the latest “cool technology” or getting
preoccupied with the latest media-hyped threat does not and will not help IT
teams raise their organization’s level of
data theft prevention.
To achieve these goals, IT teams need to adopt a more
holistic approach to securing critical data. Moreover, financial organizations’
IT teams must also fulfill the data security goals while at the same time
realizing the other two purposes of IT, which are to help the financial
organization grow, introduce new methods, and innovate. However, and perhaps
too often, these goals become lost due to the efforts to protect against
data theft. IT security must not only protect the organization’s vital
data, but it must also enable it to adopt the latest technologies, develop
processes, and maintain its competitiveness in the market.
A Data Theft Prevention (DTP) perspective is wider in
scope, more intelligent in application, and more effective in defending your
critical data. This data-centric point of view is an improvement to data
defenses, just as it ensures that data is protected from inbound and outbound
threats, but it also enables financial organizations to innovate and grow. That
being so, DTP encloses the complete security posture, not simply from a data loss prevention (DLP) perspective.
