AS the world pivoted, and adjusted to the new normal, financial institutions were unusually more exposed to digital disruption, with the pandemic a key accelerator in driving digital transformation.

       However, the pressure on financial institutions was significant as they learned to adapt to a remote workforce, navigate an evolving digital regulatory framework while facing an ever-increasing spate of sophisticated ransomware attacks.

       In Malaysia, as organisations and consumers scrambled to digital banking, to procure services, transact and conduct business, Bank Negara became acutely aware of the evolving heightened risk environment.

       The central bank started working with the financial industry at large to increase accountability, mitigate risks. strengthen data privacy, handling and management protocols.

       As digital banking and online services become de rigeur, public clouds are increasingly seen as a serious option and the most efficient way to deliver services to customers online. The need then to analyse, mitigate and recover from online breaches becomes an even greater imperative.

       Over and above legislation and cybersecurity threats, financial institutions face a catalogue of data handling issues, particularly an heightened awareness of data privacy in Malaysia. This also increases the spotlight on vendor management especially where data is managed by cloud services providers for the financial services industry.

       As the financial world resets its expectations in a post-Covid-19 landscape, the buzzword for sustainable business continuity is digital resilience.

       Regional regulators are now discussing and reviewing industry wide digital operational resilience plans to safeguard their respective financial markets.

       The European Commission and the European Central Bank for example, are leading the world in developing digital, future ready resilience protocols.

       The key to resilience is the assessment and management of risk, specifically digital operational risk.

       To identify, understand and address the risk financial institutions should perform comprehensive assessments to ensure a high standard of compliance, data governance and mitigation procedures commensurate with the risks posed by digital services.

       A fundamental concern of central bank thinking is data security and the handling of data within the banking ecosystem.

       Central banks are working with financial institutions to look at key areas of risk including the convergence of public and multicloud environments.

       In specifying common risks associated with data management within multicloud environments, regulators are working to strengthen digital operational risk management, to limit the risk of data breaches, to boost global industry and consumer confidence.

       This thinking recognises the emergence of data hyperscaler platforms including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure.

       Regulators are calling for the industry to take responsibility for securing their data,the privacy of customer’s identifiable information and workloads particularly, in the public cloud.

       For many institutions still grappling with data management challenges where they are running both cloud and on-premises solutions, while enabling remote workforces, the incidence of data silos and mass data fragmentation becomes a complex issue.

       Financial institutions are expected to implement data security protocols to protect the confidentiality, integrity of sensitive data in the public cloud.

       However, this is complicated when financial institutions are managing complex data centre infrastructure, multicloud environments, deal with fragmented silos for backup and sprawling application assets.

       Multiple point-based data management applications in such instances only increase attack surfaces, scale-up the complexities affecting data storage performance, efficiency, and costs for financial institutions.

       In this developing data management landscape, financial institutions need solutions that help them not only address their main data protection-related requirements but also enable them to implement broader infrastructure strategies including automation, analytics, multicloud adoption, and storage consolidation.

       A solution to this complex problem is to view data management holistically – by consolidating all secondary workloads and data services at web-scale. Built as a scale-out platform with a linear pay-as-you-grow scalability and always-on availability, the Cohesity solution eliminates the need for mass data migrations and “forklift” upgrades.

       This enables organisations to maximise space, cost and operational efficiency.

       By running multi-cloud data management solutions, organisations replace multiple data protection silos including media servers, cloud gateways and target storage with a single view, converged solution.

       Fundamentally, financial institutions must review solutions that go beyond their core needs, to review solutions that cater to managing workloads for analytics, DevOps, secondary storage consolidation and enable a cloud-ready environment.

       An end-to-end data management platform for long-term archiving, retention, and analytics not only address core data security and risks mitigation requirements, highlighted by regulators, but also improves the ability to operate in a hybrid, multicloud, environment.

       Cohesity is a Terabyte Partner of the Digital Financing: Powering a Ca$hless Economy Live Virtual Conference that was held from June 22-23, in conjunction with Star Media Group’s 50th Anniversary. Visit bit.ly/digifinplaylist to watch the sessions’ replay.