Best practices financial and insurance companies can follow to protect their data

Data – such an important word. And yet, not everyone gets the idea of what value brings to all corporates and how to be protected.
According to an executive brief from Verizon, 27% of the malware incidents accounts from ransomware. The same brief reports that 18% of organizations blocked at least one piece of ransomware.

Let’s deep dive into the Financial and insurance sector. The financial motive to get quickly monetized data is what matters most. Through all attacks on the small companies, 83% of them are based on financial purposes. The same report shows us that the Northern American attacks include 78% of web applications hooked using stolen credentials.

Which best practices financial and insurance companies can follow to protect their data?

From the beginning, we should acknowledge that the cornerstone of our data is backup, recovery, and security. In such a way, you will protect data, applications, and systems against data loss, theft, and downtime.

• Set up backup schedules for your servers, virtual machines, and applications. Planning a time to backup your files and folders is one of the simplest things you can do to secure operations data. No one is protected from extensive data loss. According to CNBC, last year DarkWeb criminals sold credentials for customers of E*Trade, Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Robinhood, and others, according to New York-based security firm Intsights.
  
• Implement continuous data protection. Monitoring every change in the system helps to restore data from the latest backup and apply the latest collected changes in case of malware infection. Such a policy will help you monitor the protection status of files with classification, reporting, and unstructured data analytics.
  
• Increase cybersecurity. Prevent restoring infected files from backups and bring back only clean files. The insurance industry still remembers the case of Travelex on New Years’ Eve 2019, where the UK and international websites and mobile apps took offline following a reported cyberattack.
  
• Plan a Disaster Recovery policy. Frequently to provide business continuity in the finance industry, data loss prevention is a must in case of operational disruption.

What more the financial sector should know to protect their data?

The Financial sector is under strict regulations and should comply with various acts and standards like Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and FINRA requirements imposed by the Federal Reserve and SEC.

Based on the regulations, applications and platforms like Microsoft 365, G Suite, or Apple environment need backup space integrated with cybersecurity and DR functionalities.

To understand more on how your data should be protected, download our FREE book “Six Backup Insights that drive change”. Or book a free session with one of our consultants.