Financial institutions these days are starting to adopt cloud resources to enhance the productivity levels of their businesses. By making sure that their employees are able to work with the best tools, organisations can optimise their profits and successes. That being said, financial services providers still find themselves often running into major obstacles that make it tough to migrate to the cloud.

As financial institutions hold the responsibility of managing massive amounts of information and data of a highly confidential and valuable nature, they find themselves carrying a great target on their backs. Cybercriminals wanting to earn an extremely hefty payoff will go all the way in getting their hands on such valuable and sensitive data. Failure to secure data systems will result in not only damages to the institutions’ finances, but also to their reputation as customers will immediately lose their trust and loyalty in the company.

With the leading causes of data breaches being identified as theft of login credentials and the compromising of user accounts, cloud identity and access management(IAM) solutions come into the picture as they are able to enhance the IT security of financial services organisations through various means.

Passwords will no longer become the weak spots of an organisation’s security infrastructure. Through the features of single sign-on (SSO), IT teams are empowered to be able to enforce tight password regulations across systems and applications that are being used by both customers and employees. SSO further eliminates the need to remember different sets of login credentials and writing them down, therefore reducing the risk of an account being compromised by a hacker. To augment existing security systems, multifactor authentication (MFA) offers another layer of protection against hackers. No matter how complex a password can be, hackers can still find a way to break the code using their latest tech resources. It is therefore necessary to tap on the strengths of MFA which prevents any user account from being accessed by unauthorised people. In the background, risk assessments and account logins are constantly being tracked and monitored, so as to any suspicious and high-risk attempts of logging in. If there is a suspicious login attempt being traced from an unusual geographical location, IP address, device, or timing, MFA will kick in with extra authentication mechanisms to verify the identity of the user. Aside from empowering the security of user accounts, modern IAM solutions enable IT administrators to regulate access control across different channels, services, applications and systems, through the methods of whitelisting and access restriction based on IP address or geographical location.

Another main concern for organisation is the compliance to legal regulatory requirements, especially within the financial services sector. Failure to pass audits will result in business being affected. Cloud IAM enables financial institutions to demonstrate IAM practices through reports and analyses based on event data supplied in real-time. Moreover, IAM is able to combat the risks of shadow IT, through the enhancement of workplace productivity. Cloud IAM thus helps financial organisations balance efficiency and security.