Mitigating Systemic Risk and Improving Operational Resilience in the Financial Services Industry
Armis empowers financial institutions to take control of their complex infrastructure to see, protect and manage their assets and data in real-time. Armis Centrix™ enables customers to manage their attack surface and consolidate, prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities. With Armis, banks and financial institutions can detect and stop attacks, control the blast radius and ensure their most critical assets are protected.
Strengthening Cybersecurity and Operational Resilience in the Financial Sector
Financial Institutions Are Drowning in a Sea of Fragmented Security Data, Leaving Them Alarmingly Vulnerable to Cyberattacks
The finance industry must tackle the challenges posed by operational blindspots and attack surface expansion.
Asset inventories are incomplete and manually maintained leading to operational resilience blindspots
According to UKFI data, financial institutions can only see an average of 25% of the assets on their network.
A recent survey of 130 global financial institutions found that 74% experienced at least one ransomware attack over the past year. For banks, it seems it’s not a case of ‘if’ but ‘when’.
The lack of asset visibility or real-time inventory means operational resilience blindspots are growing with an accompanying increase in cyber attacks.
Contextual asset data is stored in silos leading to duplication, contradiction and inefficiency
The average financial institution utilizes 76 different systems to manage their cybersecurity operations.
This data complexity forces financial enterprises to aggregate and share their data using manual methods such as spreadsheets, Word and email.
Reliance on these manual processes leaves the financial industry exposed, both via potential loss of critical services and non compliance with regulatory standards.
The final deadline for implementing all aspects on operational resilience (DORA) is 31 March 2025
The finance sector faces mounting regulatory pressures, including impending deadlines such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) in the European Union, alongside established regulations like Basel III, MiFID II and GDPR. These rules demand rigorous risk management, data protection and operational resilience.
The convergence of DORA with these existing regulations accentuates the need for financial institutions to proactively adapt their operations in order to navigate this complex regulatory landscape effectively while upholding operational resilience.
With the exponential expansion of assets and attack surface, the risk of cyber breaches and regulatory non compliance is at an all time high.
Complete, Real-Time Visibility
By providing complete asset visibility across all asset types, Armis Centrix™ gives financial services organizations complete control over their assets. It allows them to pull asset-related data from relevant IT and security tools to obtain rich, contextual intelligence about each asset in the inventory. The data is not only aggregated, but also deduplicated and normalized. Armis Centrix™ then pushes this data to the CMDB to create an accurate and comprehensive view of all assets, complete with enriched contextual data.
In the financial services industry, achieving complete visibility is essential, and Armis’ cloud classification is at the forefront of this endeavor. The platform provides real-time insights into network assets with the option to deploy smart active querying to proactively quiz your network. This facilitates classifying devices and applications to differentiate authorized from unauthorized ones, across every type of device including IoT.
Business Critical Risk-Based Prioritization for Financial Services
With Armis you can calculate your risk by assessing factors including severity score, exploitability, and reputation of vulnerabilities, in addition to considering the business impact and priority of assets based on their functionality, ownership, stored data, and other relevant context. Asset criticality is automatically determined using AI-driven Asset Intelligence Engine insights, which can also be tailored to align with the organization’s unique criteria. This blend of asset context and vulnerability risk analysis enables financial professionals to distinctly identify optimal areas for remediation that will yield the most significant positive impact on their financial institution.
Armis Centrix™ for Vulnerability Prioritization and Remediation empowers financial organizations to streamline their focus, pinpointing the most critical vulnerabilities that pose the highest risk to their operations. Using real-world intelligence, Armis analytics in conjunction with the customer’s perception of risk delivers organizations a true enterprise view of their vulnerabilities.
Achieve a Proactive Cybersecurity Posture Whilst Building and Maintaining an Effective Vulnerability Lifecycle Management Process
Armis Centrix™ aggregates all enterprise silos of vulnerability reporting. This significantly improves the efficiency with which security operation teams can remediate threats within the organization and mitigates multiple instances of cyber risk.
Armis Centrix™ for Vulnerability Prioritization and Remediation provides workflow integration with security and orchestration solutions and delivers automated responses to detected vulnerabilities. The response can be as simple as opening a ticket and alerting the responsible team, quarantining the vulnerable device until it is remediated and verified, and fully automated remediation or patching of the vulnerable asset.
Financial organizations can use pre-built dashboards and metrics to communicate to the business units and executive stakeholders/BoD the risk level and/or effectiveness of the vulnerability remediation program. Track SLAs to assess the effectiveness of different units and their remediation impact on overall enterprise risk score reduction. In this way, Armis not only helps financial organizations achieve a ‘lean forward’ security posture, it also facilitates adherence to compliance and financial regulatory frameworks.
Armis Centrix™ Can Help Address the Mounting Pressure of Financial Compliance Frameworks
The final deadline for implementing all aspects of operational resilience is March 13, 2025, with DORA being applied from January 17, 2025 in the European Union. With this in mind, finance leaders must adapt their cybersecurity strategy and tech stack to align with these new requirements or face potential fines, contract terminations and other penalties.
Armis Centrix™ gives financial institutions a platform-based approach to manage their assets, security risk posture and compliance gap analysis. For the first time, the industry is able to achieve a 100% view of their asset inventory that is continuously updated. Armis Centrix™ gives organizations a complete view of both their vulnerabilities and enterprise risk. Having complete accurate and real-time access to your data will allow IT and security leaders to future-proof their defense and meet regulatory compliance.
Financial Services Organization Gets a Reality Check on Its Assets
True, Comprehensive Asset Management from a Trusted Vendor Dedicated to Resolving Customer Issues
This rapidly growing global financial services organization is headquartered in the U.S and has approximately 15 offices worldwide. Many of the approximately 500 remote employees frequently travel all over the world for meetings with partners and other stakeholders. The organization also uses numerous cloud services and applications. In a highly regulated industry like financial services, maintaining strict security controls to protect privacy and valuable data are always top of mind.