How to Minimize Cybersecurity Risk in the Cloud Era

This article originally appeared in FEI Daily and was updated on April 9, 2020.

Cybersecurity is top of mind for CFOs. Nearly two-thirds of CFOs in a recent study said they are now taking on responsibility for operational risk management and mitigation—and elements of cybersecurity are a big part of that.

The Ponemon Report found that the typical total cost of a breach was around $4.88 million, and the lifecycle of a data breach in 2019 was 279 days longer than the 2018 lifecycle of 266 days.

Putting aside damage to brand and reputations—which can be substantial—the impact on customer trust, and in turn acquisition and retention as well as market value, all add up.

Cybersecurity is much more than securing access to applications and data, and proactively adapting to the ever-changing threat landscape. It’s also about enforcing strong controls for data integrity, protecting data from loss, and ensuring availability when the business needs it.

Finance leaders in the enterprise need to ask these questions, not only about the applications they run internally, but also of their current and prospective cloud providers:

1. What is our organization’s current exposure to cyber threats?

2. How well are we prepared, and how well are our cloud providers prepared?

3. What is our overall risk tolerance, and are our cloud providers aligned with this?

4. Do we and our providers have processes in place to prevent, detect, contain, and respond?

5. Are our providers investing to reduce risk of data loss or downtime?

6. Do we and our providers have a thoroughly tested plan, so there is no delay in the event of an attack?

When cloud computing first entered mainstream technology over a decade ago, cybersecurity was often a top concern amongst CFOs and IT alike. Those concerns have waned over recent years, with around 80% of CFOs using the cloud in some form.

Cloud technology is now becoming the backbone of the new finance technology landscape.

The best-run cloud providers locate applications and data in physically secure, redundant, and geographically distributed data centers. They employ dedicated trained security personnel and adhere to strong policies, controls, and separation of duties as laid out by standards such as those outlined in SOC 2 and ISO 27001.

They encrypt data at rest and in transit using the latest technology, and ensure applications and infrastructure are always up to date. And they publish their availability and offer SLAs they can stand behind.

It’s a combination that’s often hard to cost-effectively achieve with in-house systems and personnel running on-premise systems.

The role of cybersecurity is increasingly falling to finance leaders, with enterprise-wide operational risk management being added to their growing list of roles and responsibilities.

As a result, education is needed more than ever, because it’s essential for finance executives to ask the right questions and feel comfortable getting into the detail about prospective cloud providers’ cybersecurity investments, policies, and procedures.

But with so many terms bandied around with compliance, it can be challenging to understand the meaning behind the acronyms, and ensure the certifications you’re asking for, or that your vendors are providing, give you the assurances you expect.

Read our latest CFO Playbook for the practical guidance you need to minimize cybersecurity risk with cloud vendors.