How financial services strengthen cybersecurity and risk analytics with data cloud technology

By Theo Hourmouzis (pictured), ANZ Regional Vice President, Snowflake.

The financial services industry is not immune to facing unprecedented threats from the proliferation and evolving sophistication of cybersecurity attacks. Even if Australia becomes the “best in the world” with its cyber security, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil has warned that the nation will continue to see cyberattacks. Last year, The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) received 76,000 cybercrime reports in the previous financial year, up 13% from the period before.

Many organisations risk increased breach and remediation costs, as well as potential loss of business. Legacy architectures create significant challenges that limit how banks can mobilise security data at scale and build robust analytics capabilities.

In some instances, IT and risk management teams rely on static presentations and spreadsheets to track security metrics monthly or quarterly. This, coupled with evolving business models, new digital channels, and changing industry frameworks, creates challenges for financial services organisations to efficiently manage their risks. With the right tools, companies can better prevent cybersecurity incidents.

Companies need to enable their security teams to consolidate their risk data and perform risk analytics to combat cybersecurity threats. Technology such as security data lakes helps eliminate data silos and instead brings together data onto a single platform, enabling teams to create customised, dynamic dashboards that measure risk and prioritise the alerts teams need to investigate. Cloud-built, multi-clustered shared data architecture and financial services organisations can efficiently store years of semi-structured log data, and scale compute resources up or down, on a regulated schedule or on the fly, to meet the needs of security teams.

For example, Australian accounting software and business management platform MYOB has streamlined its various datasets to increase the security of their systems.

Undertaking a process to “SaaS-ify” the company’s operations and data management, the 30-year-old start-up had to make fundamental changes to the way their data was stored and managed. Time-intensive tasks such as gathering evidence for audits and reviews have been replaced by streaming data pipelines that continuously record activity and configuration events. Reports and metrics now provide an up-to-date picture of the environment, and asset details and user records are centralised for a complete 360-degree view.

Discover how your organisation can use Snowflake to strengthen risk management and cybersecurity.