Bearing in mind the advent of cloud computing, cloud security is starting to become a prime concern for any industry across the globe. As for the financial services industry, highly important and sensitive data is stored all over in spaces located within the cloud that are possessed by the organisation. As cloud computing soon becomes the main thing in which most businesses and establishments are depending to improve business profitability and raise the efficiency of their work processes, cloud security makes sure that work environments can stay productive and versatile, under secured conditions. With more and more hackers and cybercriminals find new and innovative ways to prey on major financial institutions, it is therefore imperative for any firm within the financial sector to mitigate risks and patch any glaring chinks in their IT security armour. Data privacy and cloud security has been gradually growing in terms of regulations getting tighter and more demanding on the financial services organisations. Such businesses and firms have absolutely no margin for error, as one slight mistake can give opportunity for a breach in security network. This will result in data breaches, incurring massive losses and damages in not just the company’s earnings, but also their reputation and the trust that potential customers may have.

That is not all to the issues surrounding the banking and financial services sector. As technology becomes increasingly prevalent in our lives, the quality of living is on a rapid pace of improvement. This therefore gives customers higher demands and expectations when it comes to the delivery of user experiences by the financial services firms. Customers want to be able to conduct business transactions on the go, and able to settle any financial needs they might have with seamlessness and convenience. Moreover, by giving consistent, convenient and secured user experiences to customers, financial services firms are able to secure and gain the trust of customers, therefore contributing to the growth of their reputation and brand image. All these obstacles and hurdles can be easily navigated by financial services companies through the adoption of a modern financial grade identity and access and management (IAM) that can strike a balance between security and business agility.

With most IAM solutions, they are ideally robust and sufficient to ensure that companies remain compliant towards the industrial regulations and requirements. Access to identity data can be easily monitored and tracked by the companies, and thus shared in safe and secured manners, while capturing the consent of customers. The potential scope of data breaches can be easily minimised by tracking down when, how and by whom the identity data is being accessed, as well as, managing the access to the application to cardholders’ data. With multifactor authentication (MFA) provided by IAM, companies can further reduce risks by regulating access on a case-by-case basis, thus strengthening IT security.

Single sign-on (SSO) is another key feature offered by IAM that ensures that services and applications are easily accessible. Customer experience will thus be enhanced. As businesses move towards a cloud-based future with hybrid IT, IAM is the solution that is here to stay.