Inside the Mind of a CISO: Expert Insights on Modern Cybersecurity Strategies for BFSI

Cybersecurity experts are seeing a clear shift from threat prevention to operational resilience. Modern resilience preparation continues to gain momentum and evolve as cyber risks change. To be prepared for today's threat landscape, organizations must proactively address not only threat prevention but also recovery after breaches occur.

Our Rackspace Technology cybersecurity experts recently shared valuable insights on modern strategies for building resilience and safeguarding data. The panel explored a range of critical issues related to hardening resiliency and strengthening data security in today's complex banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector. They drew on their extensive firsthand experience protecting enterprise environments for Rackspace customers.

The Rackspace cybersecurity panel included:

• Joanne Flack, VP Deputy General Counsel & Chief Privacy Officer - Global
• Deepak Peswani, Sr. Director of Product Management
• Travis Runty, VP of Security - Public Cloud

The experts identified the key threats currently impacting the financial sector, including:

• Regulatory and compliance breaches, like strict regulations and hefty penalties
• Technology failures, such as outdated systems and downtime
• Operational risks, like third-party dependency vulnerabilities
• Ransomware attacks, such as high-value targets for hackers
• Natural disasters and environmental risks, like weather events that threaten infrastructure

How to foster a security-first culture

Peswani: I'd recommend alignment, training and execution. Align with your CISOs and chief security officers. That's number one to start building a strong security culture. Then train around fraud and data privacy laws. Then deployment of constant monitoring, including simulating real-world attacks, penetration testing and zero-trust policies.

Runty: Think top up, bottom down and shift left. Talk about it. Make it top of mind. Be aware. Make it a priority. Take security experts out of the corner of the building and distribute them within each development team. This helps security people feel involved and accountable from the bottom up. Also, security can be boring, but you can make it fun. For example, consider gamification exercises to stimulate out-of-the-box (shift left) thinking.

Creating a security-first culture is foundational to an effective cybersecurity strategy. By integrating security consciousness at every level of the organization and making it engaging, rather than burdensome, companies can significantly reduce vulnerabilities that stem from human error. This cultural shift can help transform security from an IT department concern to an organization-wide responsibility.

Key components of a modern resilience strategy

Flack: Regulators used to talk about data privacy as the hygiene of collecting, maintaining and securing data. But securing would often be an afterthought of regulators. That has shifted today. Now, we're seeing that regulators are also focused on resiliency, understanding that we should plan to fail. How we plan to fail is critical.

The regulatory landscape's shift toward resilience represents a major evolution in cybersecurity thinking. This change acknowledges the reality that perfect prevention is impossible in today's threat environment. Organizations that develop comprehensive failure response strategies can minimize damage, maintain operational continuity and protect their reputation when — not if — security incidents occur.

Technical changes in cybersecurity priorities

Runty: We're seeing that most organizations are somewhere on their journey toward implementing zero-trust best practices. Also, with the increasing number of ransomware incidences, we're seeing an increase in the deployment of sensors and triangulation with data to, for example, identify threats, correlate motions and trace old behaviors.

The technical evolution toward zero-trust architectures and enhanced threat detection capabilities signals a significant maturity in organizational security postures. These advancements allow security teams to move from reactive to proactive approaches, identifying potential threats before they cause significant damage. This technological progression is essential as threat actors continuously refine their techniques and attack vectors.

Preventing and recovering from breaches

Flack: It’s important that they've thought through everything upfront and created policies, playbooks and runbooks. Also, they should be running tabletop, real-life breach scenarios. You need to know: Are you testing your business continuity plan? Are you implementing the processes before you need them? Can they be deployed seamlessly? How can we deploy automation to do things faster and more efficiently and with more monitoring and awareness of what's going on?

Preparation and practice are the cornerstones of effective breach prevention and recovery. By creating detailed response plans and regularly testing them through realistic scenarios, organizations build muscle memory that becomes invaluable during actual security incidents. This proactive approach significantly reduces response times, minimizes damage and accelerates recovery — ultimately protecting both data assets and business reputations when breaches occur.

The future of organizational resilience

Resiliency must be organization-wide with governance partnerships across privacy, CISO, technology and infosec teams. It's not just a technical challenge or just a people challenge — it's finding the right balance between people and technology.

A modern resilience strategy should focus on hardening the environment, monitoring vulnerabilities and intrusions through automated and predictive threat detection and implementing effective remediation protocols. Problems will inevitably occur, and the key differentiator is how organizations ensure protection of both their own data and their clients’ data — which represents the area of greatest risk.

Learn more about building a modern hybrid cloud strategy for BFSI that helps strengthen your IT resilience and safeguards data.
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