Protecting Banking Clients and Data with Secure IT Solutions Chicago

Banking and the overall financial services industry rely on large amounts of client data, a valuable resource that must be safeguarded and secured. The increasing demand by clients for data accessibility has made this data more vulnerable to unknown attackers.

Financial institutions are being forced to reconsider their IT security landscape because of the rise in identity theft, online fraud, and data breach occurrences in tandem with technological advancements such as digital transformation, artificial intelligence, and big data.

In this article, we'll look at some things for banks to consider as they design and implement proactive data security and privacy procedures.

Ditching Cybercrime Through Better Cybersecurity Measures

As more businesses go online and applications for numerous business processes are developed, cybercrime and cyberattacks are becoming more common. According to a horrifying statistic published by Statista, the global banking sector was the most targeted, susceptible, and vulnerable industry in 2020, with 147 cyber espionage occurrences.

Financial organizations are targeted by cybercriminals and hackers because they are entrusted with large amounts of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which must be kept for operational purposes.

Let’s dig into how that PII can be secured.

The cornerstone of a solid cybersecurity endeavor is maintaining the CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, and availability) of technical systems and the IT network.

Within the average banking IT ecosystem, there are numerous layers of cybersecurity. Computer systems, network switches, core storage devices, and users and processes make up these levels. While the first line of defense is a well-designed firewall, various other techniques should not be disregarded to defeat cyberattacks. Here are a few examples:

• Using powerful and secure intrusion detection tools in the IT environment
• Conducting periodic vulnerability assessments of essential IT assets
• Using two-factor authentication (2FA) to ensure secure access to business-critical data
• Implementing cloud security solutions that can secure and offer limited access to customer data to effectively maintain a DevSecOps environment

Secure Infrastructure For Financial Institutions

The financial services industry has embraced digital change during the last few years. The end client recognizes the benefits of digitizing financial transactions and choosing e-wallets and contactless payment over cash and cards. The requirement to safeguard traffic over the growing network is critical as the number of transactions facilitated by a financial institution grows year after year.

Pronix Inc. has the necessary skill set to migrate legacy infrastructure to a modern cloud-based secure architecture.

SD-WAN Deployment: For one of our major financial and insurance institutions, switching from expensive and unscalable MPLS VPN to more secure, flexible, and cost-effective software-defined wide-area-network (SD-WAN) has improved their resilience and quality of service by prioritizing bandwidth availability to critical applications and reduced the number of network incidents.

SD-WAN enables them to communicate over the internet using highly secure and encrypted protocols, allowing them to expand their business operations into new locations and even remote areas. Duplication of architectural components has improved the overall availability of business-critical apps by introducing resilience into the network ecosystem.

Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB): An automated watchdog to monitor the incoming traffic both for the cloud users and on-premise applications. As described below, the typical architecture of a CASB provides visibility, compliance, security, and threat protection across the network. As defined by Gartner,

“Cloud access security brokers (CASBs) are on-premises, or cloud-based security policy enforcement points, placed between cloud service consumers and cloud service providers to combine and interject enterprise security policies as the cloud-based resources are accessed.”

As a managed service provider, Pronix Inc. has the expertise to migrate your critical financial workloads from your on-premise system to your preferred public cloud provider. By leveraging our considerable security experience, our customers have been able to obtain the following benefits by implementing CASBs:

• Increased visibility of files that do not adhere to security policies. As a result, infringing materials were quarantined, and sharing access was canceled, enhancing overall security maturity
• In another deployment, multi-mode management and zero-day protection were provided by our unique CASB deployment. The deployment was agentless and provided compatibility with secure web gateways
• The customer was able to increase their operational efficiency by adopting single sign-on and encrypting data-at-rest on the public cloud.

Surviving Financial Operations Through Robust Data Backups and Restores

Financial institutions are the most heavily regulated commercial entities on the planet. Every financial institution is obligated to comply with high availability compliance criteria.

Non-availability of financial services such as internet transactions, ATM cash withdrawals, and even depositing a check at the bank (even if only for a minute) can have a cascading effect on the client’s perception of your institution’s trustworthiness. It is vital to have comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery policies in place to assure the availability of data at all times, providing uninterrupted services to customers.

Banking institutions need end-to-end data backup and restore services. Compliance with this regulatory criterium is aided by our approach to developing a failure-tolerant data availability architecture, threat detection services, and unrivaled data recovery and testing services.

We provide highly customized data backup services that are suited to your organization’s needs. Our managed services reduce the need for human reporting, which is a rigorous requirement by many regulatory agencies, with our automatic data backup, data archive, and continuity solutions in place.

Managed Cloud Backup – Best Practices To Deploy

Disparate legacy backup systems can wreak havoc on operational efficiency and leave you vulnerable to failures. These outages have the potential to cause long-term financial business disruptions. With the growing complexity of data backup technologies and third-party software solutions incorporated into the systems, it's critical to build a set of best practices for managing on-premise and cloud-based backups. The following are some of the best practices:

Always build data center redundancy: Financial institutions should store their business-critical data in various offsite locations to assure data availability in the event of a disaster. Depending on the organization's recovery point and recovery time needs, these could be hot-site or cold-site.

Verify and report data backup KPIs frequently:  Data is backed up on an hourly/daily/weekly/monthly basis, depending on its criticality. These backups should be double-checked, reported regularly, and any data inconsistencies should be addressed right away.

WORM-capable storage: For data storage, write once, read many (WORM) trustworthy discs should be employed. The solution should be able to detect any data alterations and adhere to data-integrity requirements. For archiving data and deleting end-of-life data, industry best practices should be adopted.

Enabling Secure Authentication and Access to the Financial Data

Financial services firms amass personally identifiable information (PII) on all clients. This information is confidential, and regulatory authorities are putting in place various safeguards and rules to protect it. To ensure secure access and maintain data confidentiality, integrity, and availability, three important vectors of data access must be monitored:

1. Who accessed what?
2. When was the data accessed?
3. How was the data accessed?

Protecting the organization’s brand reputation and complying with regulatory requirements at the same time has necessitated a transformation in authentication methodologies. Financial institutions and banks that formerly relied on username and password authentication have switched to two-factor authentication (2FA) and multi-level authentication.

Adaptive authentication, combined with a powerful identity and access management (IAM) systems, are required to protect the internal network from bad actors while also giving appropriate access to clients.

Response to Covid-19 Protocols and How Financial Institutions Contained its Impact

The global coronavirus pandemic began in earnest in the spring of 2020, wreaking havoc on the global economy and altering how banks and financial institutions operate. As a result of the impact, banks were forced to accelerate their IT initiatives and improve their processes to deliver better remote customer service.

The transition from traditional brick-and-mortar banking to internet banking necessitated the deployment of strong cybersecurity measures. Through the FAQ area of their websites, banks were compelled to keep customers informed about their communication channels and hours of operation.

The number of online transactions increased by about 50% in early 2020, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The necessity to strengthen their IT infrastructure loomed over the corporate offices of banks and financial institutions as more transactions took place over the internet and the bulk of bank workers accessed their applications from remote locations. As a result of all this change and upheaval, numerous levels of protection for online and mobile banking had to be implemented, including:

• Automatic time-out and session breaks
• Encryption at the secure socket layer
• Multifaceted programming against virus attacks and malware
• Biometric/facial recognition authentication

IT Consulting And Staffing

Do You Have The Right IT Strategies And The IT Specialists on your team?

Two things can drain your bank account and bring your internal workflow to a slow and bumpy halt – the wrong strategy and the wrong people. If IT strategy and IT personnel aren’t selected correctly, it can be devastating.

So, why do companies so often get strategy and staffing so wrong?

Finding the right professional to fill short-term or long-term IT Specialists/Resources needs can be frustrating and time-consuming. We’ve got the cure.

The Pronix IT Talent Acquisition and Staffing specialists draw from our extensive database of skilled, proactively screened candidates to successfully place IT professionals in contract, contract-to-hire, permanent IT positions.

Pronix IT Staffing Services in Chicago leave you free to drive sales and provide a high level of service to y our customers by outsourcing the recruiting and staffing of your vacant IT positions.

Pronix IT Solutions finds top talent in below area for all Enterprise and Business types including the following:

• Project Management, Agile Scrum
• Enterprise/Solution/Application/Data/Infrastructure/Security Architecture
• Application Development and Support
• QA Testing, Testing Automation and DevOps
• SAP Consulting and Solutions
• Business Analysis, User Experience Design(UI/UX)
• Business & IT Consulting
• Business Intelligence/Big Data
• Cloud Computing
• Network Administration, Systems Administration and Database Administration
• Desktop/Enduser Support, Application Support(L1/L2/L3)
• IT Help Desk Support(L1/L2/L2)
• Technical Talent Management and Human Capital Management(HCM)
• IT Security Engineering

Pronix IT Staffing services Chicago is an efficient way to get highly qualified, specialized personnel. Within this model can be significant savings for you! The IT professionals that we source for our clients are vetted and must prove their worth to us, long before we propose that they work with your organization. This process ensures that you get productive, experienced IT specialists that will provide value to you.

Three IT Staffing Placement Options Available at Pronix Inc

1. Contract / Project Based Placement

Ideal for short-term needs. This option offers low-enf labour to high-end specialized technical resources and everything in between. Contract technical resources and only pay form the hours needed.

2. Contract-To-Hire Placement (C2H)

Convert your temporary contractor to full-time direct employmnent at a prorated fee according to the number of hours worked.

3. Fulll Time / Permanent Placement

An Economical and Contingency-based solution which is extremely competitive to your local talent acquisition film, but with a national and international reach for IT technical and sales positions.

If you have any IT banking positions that need filling then no problem, Pronix IT Staffing and Consulting will help you with any technical IT positions that you require.

CONCLUSION

Banking and financial institutions will have to innovate and adopt IT solutions to win client confidence and market share due to the proliferation of the internet, changing methods of banking, COVID -19 protocols, and, most significantly, rigorous requirements from regulatory authorities.

Pronix Inc. provides IT consulting and implementation services. We deliver a wide range of managed services in the financial space, including innovative solutions for containing cyberattacks, deploying robust data backup and restore architectures, migrating compute-intensive workloads from on-premise to the public cloud, and leveraging our intimate knowledge of authentication and access management tools.

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