Mid-Market Cybersecurity: Don't Neglect Protection Amid Digital Transformation
At Vantage Point, we see financial services companies facing disruption, from fintech innovations to shifting customer expectations. As a Salesforce consulting partner for financial services, we help clients adapt to the ever-changing landscape to meet their business needs. In the two previous blog posts, we provide important context around the challenges facing mid-market financial institutions and how strategic technology investments can enable them to compete effectively with larger players.
The first blog post, titled "Modernizing Outdated Systems: The Crucial yet Overlooked Key to Powering Financial Innovation for Mid-Market Firms” dives deeper into the modernization challenge, noting that despite innovations like AI becoming more mainstream, many mid-market institutions still rely on outdated legacy systems. This legacy tech debt severely hampers their ability to innovate and compete.It provides recommendations on how to strategically approach this modernization journey.
The second blog post, titled “Regional Disruption: How Mid-Market Banks and Credit Unions Can Compete Through Technology” highlights the mounting competitive threats regional firms face from national megabanks, fintech disruptors, and big tech entering financial services. We then discuss some key technologies that should be considered that provide meaningful ROI.
For this blog post, we wanted to focus on the importance of CyberSecurity.
As mid-market institutions modernize systems and adopt innovative technologies like AI and cloud platforms, they open new avenues for cyber threats. It's crucial that cybersecurity be a key consideration during this digital transformation journey. Legacy platforms in many regional financial institutions lack robust security capabilities to defend against sophisticated attacks. As these systems are upgraded, safeguarding data and resilience should be top priorities. According to a 2022 survey by the American Bankers Association, over three-quarters of mid-size banks experienced attempted data breaches or hacks. The most common attack methods included phishing, ransomware, and distributed denial of service (DDoS).
Prioritizing Data Protection
With troves of sensitive customer financial data at risk, regional firms must implement layered defenses across infrastructure, applications, and endpoints. Utilizing cloud access security brokers, data loss prevention tools and micro-segmentation can help minimize attack surfaces. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is also essential for administrators and privileged users to prevent unauthorized access. Conducting regular external penetration testing helps gauge vulnerabilities proactively.
Monitoring Threats in Real-Time
As part of upgrading legacy systems, mid-market institutions should deploy security information and event management (SIEM) solutions to aggregate and analyze logs in real time. With intelligent correlation of events across hybrid cloud environments, abnormal user behavior and early attack indicators can be detected for rapid response.
Leveraging AI-Driven Security
Advanced AI and machine learning techniques can also help predict and automatically block never-before-seen malware and phishing attempts. As an example, Salesforce Shield offers Einstein AI capabilities to defend against sophisticated bots and suspicious login activity. For mid-market firms adopting Salesforce, Shield provides a robust set of security features like DDoS prevention, encryption, and transaction security to protect customer data built right into the platform. Our position is pretty straightforward here, and that is if you are in financial services, you should have the enhanced security of Salesforce Shield.
Planning for Resilience
Despite best efforts, some attacks may still impact operations. Regional financial institutions should implement comprehensive incident response plans clearly defining roles across leadership, IT, communications, and other teams. Conducting crisis simulation exercises helps polish coordination and decision-making to minimize downtime. Backup solutions with quick recovery capabilities are also important for resilience. While innovation opens new opportunities for mid-market financial firms, cybersecurity cannot be an afterthought. Prioritizing secure system modernization, detecting threats early, leveraging AI protection, and planning for incidents can help regional institutions safely embrace digital transformation.
At Vantage Point, we configure AI-powered platforms to deliver individualized recommendations and insights. We also see security as critical to maintaining trust. And while these solutions quite often have robust security, we believe it is imperative for financial services firms to evaluate and leverage solutions like Salesforce Shield for advanced protections.
As financial services institutions continue to accelerate their use of emerging technologies, it's critical that cybersecurity efforts keep pace. Many mid-market companies may not have the in-house capabilities to fully secure AI, automation, and other innovations on their own. Strategic partnerships are key. Vantage Point has found that even companies confident in their cyber posture benefit tremendously from an outside assessment to validate controls and identify potential gaps or vulnerabilities that could be overlooked internally. Our team of financial services and cybersecurity experts conducts assessments across cloud, infrastructure, applications, data, and more to provide an objective perspective and recommend security controls tailored to each client’s tech environment.