Why cybersecurity is a truly strategic conversation for Indian Banks?

The BFSI segment in India has seen growing instances of cyberattacks in recent months. What’s more, not only has the number of attacks increased, but its very nature has become harder to detect and prevent.

As per various reports, cybercriminals target the BFSI sector the most. Nearly 22% to 25% percent of cyberattacks that made headlines in the country last year were from this domain.

With the incidents of these threats unlikely to abate, BFSI companies are leaving no stone unturned to strengthen their networks.

Krishna Raj Sharma, CEO at iValue InfoSolutions said, “The digital era demands an innovative restructuring of the BFSI industry. The entry of new technologies and implementation of innovative solutions, a whole new world of opportunities is opening up. But we can’t overlook the fact that simultaneously, it’s creating a new cyberattack surface and that’s where we and our technology partners come into play to help our customers.”

He was talking at a recent summit organized in Mumbai by iValue InfoSolutions, in partnership with Tenable, a Cyber Exposure company.

The underlying theme of the event was to empower BFSI organizations to recognize and reduce their cybersecurity risks. Over 20 CIOs from the BFSI sector, predominantly the Public Sector Units (PSUs), participated in it. The attendees discussed Tenable’s Cyber Exposure platform and the importance of vulnerability management in the banking industry. During the panel discussions, IT leaders shared their experiences and highlighted current innovations and technology trends in the BFSI industry.

According to PwC’s Financial Services Technology 2020 and Beyond, 81% of BFSI CXOs are concerned about the speed of technological change. This number is higher than that of other industry sector.

“Cybersecurity is no longer a tactical function – it’s a strategic level conversation,” added Diwakar Dayal, Managing Director – India, Tenable. “As financial organizations adopt modern computing for competitive differentiation, CISOs must find new approaches to managing their cyber risk. Cyber Exposure helps shared customers manage, measure and reduce their cyber exposure in the digital era.”

BFSI companies are keen to adopt technologies like advanced analytics and business intelligence tools to identify cyber attack patterns, analyse any underlying connections and then use these to address and resolve issues in real-time. This will help their operations especially as most of these institutions are focused on rural cities of the country, where security protocols are quite vague and hence vulnerability management becomes very critical.