by Reeza Meer

Like their counterparts in many sectors, financial services organisations made huge strides during the pandemic to adapt to a radically changing business environment. This required the roll-out of innovative new digital services to support rapidly evolving customer behaviour. Over a third of consumers claim to have increased their online banking during the crisis, for example. And it demanded the large-scale roll-out of online collaboration capabilities and hardware to support mass remote working for staff. Behind it all was cloud transformation. 

Yet on the other side, these changes opened the door to new risks. Banking was second only to the government sector in terms of most popular targets for ransomware last year. In-house skills shortages and cloud complexity threaten to create multiple gaps for threat actors to exploit.