EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

How are cloud players trying to entice industries to transfer business functions to cloud platforms? AWS for financial services and Azure for financial services are expanding their offerings into industry-specific domains.

As a financial group, should you embrace these new types of cloud services? In this blog post, we’ll discuss the pros, cons and conundrums that accompany this new territory.

Compliance

It’s a no-brainer: financial services groups must prioritize compliance requirements. Cloud vendors understand this, and can easily provide dashboards and reporting measures to enable organizations to meet compliance criteria.

However, as many organizations have seen, the existence of compliance features within a cloud product do not guarantee compliance. This type of disconnect often occurs due to a competing focus between the cloud provider and the constraints of a given organization.

For financial services firms, the cloud service provider selected should be able to offer easy compliance functionalities and the capability to customize rulesets and policies in accordance with business needs.

DevSecOps

In addition to increased interest in cloud services, financial firms are also turning their attention towards fresh DevOps methodologies. The latest DevOps trends allow for improved application release timelines and simpler update management.

Right now, many DevOps teams are focused on incorporating security into the software development lifecycle. When done well, DevSecOps empowers organizations to monitor code and to improve compliance capacity.

Where is your team with DevSecOps? Best practices include:

• Placing quality assurance and vulnerability testing earlier in the release cycle. Organizations will then be able to avoid failed releases due to last-minute changes in libraries, patches or updates.
• Where possible, start building compliance requirements into broader requirements for developing infrastructure and automation.
• Continually revisiting your pipeline process to more effectively integrate the DevSecOps approach into the prevailing business culture.

Controls and Visibility:

The operational cost of using cloud resources can be difficult to contend with. Although cloud vendors offer a wide range of options and tools for administrators and IT managers, dissimilar tools and functionalities across provider platforms can make compliance management complex.

To handle this complexity, DevOps teams need time to learn and an advanced toolkit. Vendor authored security products can ease the process of maintaining compliance across workloads and infrastructure. When these types of tools are implemented, financial services groups can increase visibility across cloud architecture while simultaneously strengthening safeguards in relation to security threats.

Curious about what else to consider in securing your firm’s cloud infrastructure? Learn more here.