Infrastructure management keeps organizations’ daily operations smooth and efficient. This is especially true for financial technology companies, or “fintechs,” that depend heavily on various IT and cybersecurity assets for daily business operations. These assets are subject to degradation and vulnerabilities over time. So, they require maintenance throughout their respective lifecycles. Herein lies the central importance of infrastructure management for any company, but especially fintechs.
Benefits of IT infrastructure management for Fintechs
As crucial as IT and cybersecurity infrastructure management is for fintech companies, it can be costly and inefficient, if improperly planned. When working with a qualified advisor, the following benefits of IT infrastructure management outweigh the costs:
- Risk mitigation
- Business continuity
- Scaled implementation
- Streamlined compliance
We’ll cover each of these in detail below, followed by a quick primer on how to implement an infrastructure management program at your fintech organization with professional assistance.
Infrastructure Management Benefit #1: Risk Mitigation
A robust IT infrastructure management program includes planning for, discovering, and mitigating cybersecurity risks before they become full-on incidents. Threat and vulnerability management reduces the frequency and impact of actual cybersecurity attacks, leaks, and other incidents.
The process of risk mitigation begins by identifying which features are crucial to safeguarding your infrastructure. It then entails establishing monitoring and visibility infrastructure to ensure ongoing scans across all systems that identify internal vulnerabilities and the external threats that could exploit them.
While risk mitigation can follow a more passive, reactionary approach, a more proactive fintech organization may partner with a managed security services provider (MSSP) for threat hunting services that seek out potential attacks via managed detection and response. This includes:
- Threat detection – Identification of threats and immediate escalation when appropriate
- Incident response – Holistic, short- and long-term response and recovery (see #3)
- Root cause analysis – Deep analysis to discover initial risk factors, guiding remediation and future efforts
- Regulatory compliance – Ongoing patch management and compliance gap remediation (see #5)
For fintechs, any individual attack can incur insurmountable direct expenses and opportunity costs—reducing incident occurrence frequency facilitates seamless responses to future risks.
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Infrastructure Management Benefit #2: Business Continuity
Even the most robust cybersecurity frameworks cannot guarantee zero attacks, leaks, or other cybersecurity events. These will happen. But if sensitive data gets lost or corrupted, a fintech organization with effective IT infrastructure management doesn’t have to halt its operations. Instead, it is likely to have backups and data recovery strategies in place.
Another major benefit of infrastructure management for fintechs is robust incident management, which comprises all elements of responding to an attack. Generally, it is a six-stage process:
- Identification of incident
- Documentation of incident
- Investigation and diagnosis
- Assignment and adjustment
- Resolution and closure
- Customer satisfaction
Depending on your organization’s user interfaces and compliance requirements, you can streamline the messaging and disclosure of information about an incident directly through the application or other communication channels users are already accustomed to using.
Infrastructure Management Benefit #3: Scalable Implementation
One of the biggest challenges fintechs face is to deploy extensive IT infrastructure—often on short notice. This process can be effortless with strong infrastructure management, which allows the organization to scale up or down according to demand.
Infrastructure management includes support for architecture implementation at every stage of the process, including initial planning, development and acquisition, lifecycle management, and secure termination of systems.
As an added benefit, a robust managed architecture implementation suite should integrate seamlessly within all existing risk and incident management infrastructure, whether or not the services are provided by the same MSSP or another provider. Architecture implementation should also include robust training and awareness services to ensure that all stakeholders know their responsibilities and how to uphold them to best protect your sensitive assets.
Infrastructure Management Benefit #4: Streamlined Compliance
Compliance with various regulations is another challenge many fintechs face—this challenge’s specifics vary widely, depending on the nature of your organization, its clients, and applicable frameworks:
- Any fintech that processes credit card transactions or cardholder data may be subject to Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards, such as the Data Security Standards (DSS).
- Many fintechs may face regulatory or industry pressure to conduct SOC audits to maintain SOC compliance per the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.
- Fintechs working within or adjacent to the healthcare sector will likely need to ensure HIPAA compliance, as either covered entities proper or business associates thereof.
These are but a few of the compliance considerations likely to apply to your organization. Any robust infrastructure management program should include a regulatory compliance advisory suite that optimizes and streamlines compliance via assessment and reporting mapping.
How to Improve IT Infrastructure Management for Fintechs
Adjusting your infrastructure will improve all systems’ accuracy, agility, and simplicity. But doing so can be daunting, especially for newer fintech organizations with smaller IT departments. The best way to implement needed changes is through rigorous program advisory from a qualified expert or managed security services provider (MSSP)—RSI Security is your ideal partner.
The importance of infrastructure management for fintechs comprises more than the four benefits named above. Other factors include opportunities for program overhaul and information security management (i.e. virtual CISO) that increase efficiency and optimize overall security ROI.
For robust assistance with IT infrastructure management, contact RSI Security today!
