According to research from Veritas Technologies, the global leader in enterprise data protection, the financial services sector is lagging behind other industries in bridging the gap between new technologies introduced quickly to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and the security measures required to protect them.
The Veritas Vulnerability Lag Report polled 2,050 IT executives in the UAE and 18 other countries, with 245 from the financial services industry. Financial services firms were found to be more likely than other industries to be struggling to keep up with their security, with nearly half (48 percent) claiming that their data security was lagging behind their digital transformation deployments. Across all industries, the average was 39%.
As a result, financial services firms are putting themselves at greater risk of ransomware and other types of data loss. As businesses attempt to narrow the gap, the increased threat to the sector is expected to last another two years.
Johnny Karam, Managing Director & Vice President of International Emerging Region at Veritas Technologies, said: “In line with the UAE government’s ambitions to establish a strong digital economy, the UAE financial services sector has made significant strides in introducing new technologies and services to cater to evolving customer needs. However, the COVID-19 pandemic threw a curveball that no one could have seen coming, forcing organizations around the world to make transitions more rapidly than they anticipated. This has meant that the pace of security rollouts to protect this innovation has lagged behind, leaving them badly exposed to digital risk.
“In the UAE, we’re seeing businesses across all industries make strong progress with their data protection efforts. Unfortunately, the global financial services industry still has a long way to go. The good news is companies in this sector are beginning to r edress the balance: 16% are confident that they will be able to close the gap this year.”
Karam said: “While the pressures that COVID-led digital transformation put on IT departments weren’t unique to the financial services sector, its position as a highly-attractive target to hackers may have meant that the industry has felt them more acutely. With hackers beating at the door, and limited resources to push them back, it can feel like the IT team is between a rock and a hard place. However, astute IT leaders are finding a third way: partnering with data protection providers that can minimise the admin burden of data protection through simplified tools leveraging AI and machine learning. Taking this approach can help financial organisations to accelerate their security rollouts and stop their protection infrastructure lagging behind their digital transformation.”
Financial services firms who want to erase their vulnerability lag in less than a year will need to invest an additional $2.61 million and recruit 29 more IT employees. $2.61 million is 5% higher than the average required across all industries, which may be discouraging news for IT leaders in the industry, given that they already spent 19% more on IT efforts last year than their peers.
Financial services firms were also less likely to have the cash necessary to act wherever their security was lacking. In the financial industry, 43% of respondents indicated they lacked the funding to close all of their gaps, compared to 28% in the energy sector and only 25% in the public sector.
While this vulnerability gap remains, cloud environments are the most vulnerable: Because of the pandemic, 82 percent of financial services respondents have added new cloud capabilities or expanded components of their cloud infrastructure beyond their original projections. With companies introducing an average of six new cloud services in the last twelve months, 54 percent of respondents indicated their cloud protection strategy had gaps – more than any other area.
Three out of five IT leaders in financial services organisations stated security risks have increased as a result of COVID-led digital transformation programmes, with 44 percent saying the danger of ransomware attacks has increased in particular.
The vulnerability has already harmed business operations. Financial services were the victims of 3.22 ransomware attacks that caused interruption and downtime on average in the last 12 months, which is over a third (32%) higher than the overall average.
