The International Monetary Fund’s April 2024 Global Financial Stability Report dedicated a chapter to the “heightened risk” financial institutions face with “greater threat” of suffering a cyberattack and extreme losses. Financial services and cybersecurity isn’t the only concern. Compliance is also a challenge. Fortunately, cutting-edge technology available from Cisco can help shore up defenses and compliance.

Cybersecurity and Compliance Context

Financial institutions make an attractive target. They store vast amounts of sensitive and valuable data and have complex infrastructure. Along with the financial motivation, a successful attack could provide notoriety or disrupt economic stability. In December 2023, an attack on five servers at the Central Bank of Lesotho disrupted the entire nation’s banking sector for 10 days.

Meanwhile, financial institutions are also subject to stringent regulatory requirements. Violations can result in severe financial penalties, reputation damage, and legal consequences.

Given these risks, financial services and cybersecurity go hand and glove. Fortunately, installing Cisco Umbrella at a financial institution can help enhance cybersecurity and ensure regulatory compliance.

How to Integrate Umbrella into Financial IT

TBL Networks offers a free, two-week trial of Cisco Umbrella. Let’s first discuss what we do, step by step, when fully integrating Umbrella into the IT infrastructure of our financial clients.

1. Assess and Plan: To ensure security, reliability, and compliance, integrating Cisco Umbrella begins with exploration to understand the financial institution’s existing IT infrastructure. After identifying specific requirements, such as network size, security needs, compliance regulations (e.g., PCI DSS), and performance goals, we can design a custom integration.
2. Design the Integration: In addition to DNS-layer security and interactive threat intelligence, Cisco Umbrella includes secure web gateway, firewall, and cloud access security broker (CASB) functionality, plus integration with Cisco SD-WAN, delivered from a single cloud security service. To custom design the most effective network architecture, including routers, switches, firewalls, and security appliances, we consider the firm’s unique needs as well as redundancy, scalability, and disaster recovery options.
3. Installation & Testing: Having identified and procured the necessary hardware and software components, we can install and configure Cisco Umbrella according to best practices and security guidelines. We don’t just trust that we’ve done it correctly. We always thoroughly test the installation to ensure proper functionality and interoperability with existing systems.
4. Integration Optimization: To get the most out of integrating Cisco Umbrella with the existing infrastructure, the next step involves a lot of fine-tuning, including:
   1. Configuring authentication and authorization mechanisms to ensure seamless access control.
   2. Implementing network segmentation to isolate sensitive financial data and minimize the risk of unauthorized access.
   3. Optimizing network settings for performance, security, and reliability.
   4. Implementing Quality of Service (QoS) policies to prioritize critical financial transactions and data.
   5. Enabling intrusion prevention systems (IPS), malware detection, and content filtering to safeguard against cyber threats.
   6. Implementing encryption protocols (e.g., SSL/TLS) to secure data in transit and at rest.
5. Monitoring and Management: Even after the integration is up and running and effectively optimized, monitoring and management is key. This helps ensure ongoing network performance and security. Regular updates of firmware and software patches is also essential to mitigate known vulnerabilities. Plus, this step helps us to be proactive about detecting and responding to potential security incidents. Conducting regular assessments and audits helps us to identify areas for improvement. Meanwhile, TBL stays up to date on new Umbrella features that could further enhance the institution’s IT infrastructure. It’s all part of continuously optimizing and refining the integration to adapt to both the financial institution’s dynamic business requirements and evolving security threats.

Financial Services and Cybersecurity and TBL

With this step-by-step approach to deploying Cisco Umbrella in a financial IT environment, TBL helps mitigate cybersecurity risks, strengthens regulatory compliance efforts, and ensures a secure and productive digital environment for employees and customers alike.

You can try Umbrella for 14 days in just ten minutes with a trial of Umbrella’s offering. Easily enjoy advanced threat protection, cloud and DNS-level security, and more.