Financial Services: Protect Customer Data and Save on Cloud Spend with CloudCheckr

Ensure Security, Compliance, and Cost Efficiency in the Cloud

Keeping customer data—and money—safe is critical in the financial services industry. Whether you operate a digital-only bank, a traditional bank, or credit union with a 100-year history, everyone in financial services has the same overarching concerns: cloud data security, compliance, and cost control. 

The Challenge

In today’s modern environment, every company is a technology company, whether they offer financial services or auto parts. According to the Forbes Technology Council, that’s because no company can make, deliver, or market its product efficiently without technology in today’s world. “Companies that adapt quickly to new technologies gain a foothold on the market,” said Stephanie Stone, CIO of Americas at M+W Group.

But each industry has slightly different challenges in a technology-first world. For financial services, the need to stay competitive by using the cloud to offer better banking experiences is just as important as the need to protect customers’ financial information—and the bank’s own money—with the best security possible.

Hand-in-hand with cloud data security is the challenge of creating a compliant cloud infrastructure. To avoid exposing confidential customer and business data, financial services institutions must ensure total compliance with all regulatory requirements. Additionally, these companies are often required to adhere to strict budgets with limited personnel, which can cause tension in dealing with the above concerns. 

Security Strains

Ensuring on-premises data center security is time-consuming and requires a major, continual investment in Information Technology (IT) resources—both expensive hardware and highly-paid professionals. And unfortunately, proper data center management doesn’t automatically give financial services companies a competitive advantage. It’s merely the minimum required to operate in the industry. 

Compliance Gaps

Financial services is a highly-regulated industry, and financial services companies have to deal with a wide array of compliance regimes around the world, mostly dealing with security and privacy. Ensuring continual compliance, like security, is the cost of doing business in the industry rather than an IT activity that differentiates your service offerings. 

Tight Budgets

Even major financial services institutions have limited IT budgets. When a large portion of the budget is designated to developing new products and services to improve customer experiences, not much is left over to invest in cloud data security and compliance. This give-and-take often involves making difficult choices between competing priorities. 

The Solution

Unified Cloud Management

Give time and money back to your IT department with one dashboard cloud management. With CloudCheckr’s unified cloud management platform (CMP), companies can tackle the security, compliance, and budgetary challenges involved with moving to the cloud and focus their resources on providing innovative new services to customers and creating a competitive advantage. Unlike standalone security tools, which often come with an expensive price tag, CloudCheckr includes security and compliance capabilities, plus cost optimization functionality for an instant ROI.

Security Monitoring

Moving to the cloud lets financial services companies take advantage of the security expertise that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and/or Google Cloud Services integrate into their cloud-based infrastructure. CloudCheckr’s integrated security configuration and cloud monitoring tools track activity, best practices, and can even be configured for auto-healing, which results in an environment that is more secure than any data center. 

Continuous Compliance

Compliance in the cloud is the shared responsibility of both cloud service providers like AWS and the end user. This does mean that individual companies no longer have to manage the entire compliance story, as they do in a data center. Using CloudCheckr’s cloud compliance monitoring, best practice configuration checklists, and automated self-healing means that financial services companies can ensure their entire technology stack is secure and compliant in the cloud at all times. 

Cost Optimization

Reducing IT expenses is one of the main reasons modern businesses move to the cloud. Moving away from the data center will reduce the expenses related to managing data centers on-site, and will likely result in higher utilization and uptime for your product offerings. However, without a cost optimization tool like CloudCheckr, many companies quickly realize the “pay-as-you-go” model of the cloud can lead to higher bills than expected. With CloudCheckr, financial services companies can get detailed visibility into where their cloud spend is going and get recommendations for reducing costs without compromising performance or availability. 

Make CloudCheckr Part of Your Cloud Transition

By integrating CloudCheckr into the cloud strategy, financial services can get all of the benefits of moving to the cloud while ensuring the highest levels of security, continual compliance, and cost management. CloudCheckr lets businesses focus on using IT resources to find creative ways to improve customers’ banking experience.

• Comprehensive cloud monitoring tools and auto-healing for data security. Proactive risk identification, perimeter assessments, account permission, role mapping, and continuous analysis of configurations and log files
• Automated compliance tracking and scoring based on more than 30 international frameworks.
• Audit Preparedness with SnapBack™. Maintain read-only, tamper-proof copies of your reports for as long as seven years in order to meet regulatory standards.
• Automated cloud cost optimization. Right Sizing recommendations, Reserved Instance (RI) purchasing recommendations, and detailed cost reports.

CloudCheckr gives financial services companies the peace of mind that their infrastructure is secure and compliant. It ensures compliance with security and privacy regulations at all times, and that resources, like personnel and budget, are used effectively. A comprehensive cloud management solution offers businesses the ability to focus on improving customer experience and building a competitive advantage in the industry.

The largest enterprises, service providers, resellers, and government agencies trust CloudCheckr with their public cloud security. Schedule a demo to see CloudCheckr in action.