Cloud Series: How Financial Services Can Embrace the Cloud

With ForgeRock, Financial Service Organizations Can Deploy Our Identity Solution Anywhere, At Any Scale, With a Unified Code Base

 

Cloud Series FSI Blog 1.jpg

 

Can Financial Services Organizations Feel Safe Embracing the Cloud?

Given the heightened need for security and the daily challenges of keeping up with regulations, you might think the financial services industry would be an unlikely industry to embrace the cloud. But, in reality, cloud services offer more benefits at less cost than traditional on premises software solutions – often without sacrificing security. Yet when talking to any financial service organization, it’s clear many are comparing notes and still considering how they will do it. So who is really embracing the cloud? And how are they doing it?

Survey data from 451 Research finds that financial services are moving to the public cloud, cutting their on-premises costs in half and reallocating those resources to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform as-a-Service (PaaS), and the public cloud (from 9% to 28%) over a two-year period. Often the reallocation of processing resources to the cloud involves common business services such as managing human resources and accounting. However, there is the potential to use the cloud for much more.

Risks Today

Financial services have a lot to lose if there is a data breach, which can result not only in loss of funds, but also in loss of trust and reputation. According to the 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report, attacks against financial services remain number one. In Q1 2019, breaches to financial services cost the industry $6.2 billion, up from $8 million in Q1 2018. This is in line with a 2019 report from ForgeRock, where cybercriminals exposed a total of 2.8 billion consumer data records in 2018 and cost U.S. organizations over $654 billion. Of those customer data breaches reported from January 1, 2018 through March 31, 2019, 11% percent directly affected financial services, which is second in losses only to healthcare.

In light of these losses, something needs to be done.  

The cloud offers organizations faster processing, more monitoring, and more redundancy. Faster processing allows for machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) fraud detection via pattern matching and behavioral analysis. More monitoring comes from the cloud provider, the software vendor, and customer. The cloud provider provides an initial layer of security. Then there’s the software provider following industry best coding practices and updating its released software immediately when needed. There’s also the customer, making sure their data is encrypted and the keys securely stored. All of these parties are vigilant, monitoring the status of the cloud 24/7. And in order to achieve high availability, redundancy allows for additional security testing, recovery, and failover. 

Most financial services organizations do want to move to the cloud but remain constrained by legacy technology platforms and regulation. With ForgeRock, financial service organizations can deploy a modern identity solution anywhere and at any scale. And with our unified unified code base, ForgeRock enables your cloud strategy to flex as needed based on factors such as performance and price.

The Future is Hybrid

What makes the most sense for financial services is a hybrid solution. This keeps critical financial services data on premises while high-volume transaction processing can be offloaded and moved to the more efficient cloud environment. This requires a real-time access identity management that supports mature security methodologies, such as Zero Trust and CARTA, to uniquely identify the user no matter where they are and what device they use.

Financial services may also find additional value in the cloud by reducing their DevOps costs. For example, they can move their application development and testing to the cloud for rapid prototyping. Once the new applications and services have been secured, they can be moved back into the production environment, which may be located on premises. Rapid prototyping allows financial services organizations to offer more feature-rich customer-facing apps and services faster and at reduced costs.

Taking this hybrid approach makes it all the more important that organizations also have access to an independent administration view, one that can span all the environments where their data lives. The ForgeRock Identity Cloud provides that universal view of customers, employees, and things – whether it’s on premises, multi-cloud, or cloud. 

With the ForgeRock Identity Cloud, we offer the only comprehensive identity platform available as-a-service, with feature parity across all deployments. That means you can deploy the same codebase with our full DevOps capabilities on premises or within any cloud environment, including multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, to handle all your complex identity needs. That’s the ForgeRock difference.

Learn more here. Or contact your sales rep today.