Stephan Fabel, Director of Product, Canonical
Over the last few years, there has been a growing realisation that privacy is the right of every citizen. Equally, it’s increasingly evident that you can’t enable privacy without having security in place. You only need to look at the volume of headlines reporting cyber-attacks in any given week or month to see that a number of companies have been irresponsible to date. No organisation is immune to today’s cyber threats, not least financial services companies which process and handle vast amounts of sensitive information. With this in mind, these businesses need to ensure they’re adopting the right technologies to protect themselves from this growing threat.
Encryption is one of the most notable security solutions in modern-day banking and fintech operations. Banks are well-known for using encryption for security reasons. Today, the biggest challenge lies in bringing this level of security to the wider industry. Finserv customers expect stringent levels of security coupled with easy deployment, flexibility, and agility, which often poses a challenge for IT teams. Yet there are solutions available to overcome this issue, with IBM providing one example. It is working alongside Canonical to provide its fintech customers with the technology to optimise data protection and privacy across both containers and multi-cloud infrastructures.
The arrival of containerisation
One such technology is the “secure service container”, developed specifically for container-based applications on IBM’s LinuxONE. It offers developers a mix of hardware and software, which enables them to derive the same quality of security that they would on Linux, and in any data centre – whether on-premise or in the cloud.
The next generations of finserv infrastructures are being built around Linux because it is easy to deploy, and gives a highly functional and easily automated stack. Industry giants such as Barclays have already built whole data centre infrastructures around Linux. Beyond providing easy access to innovations and software frameworks for IT departments, open source software also increases trust, which is essential for security compliance in the long term.
With close-sourced software, it is not possible to verify all background activities taking place, and in the case of a bug or an error, it is difficult to assess the reasons behind them, due to the fact that only the original developer has access to the backend. Whereas with open source, the community of developers is very quick to identify and fix bugs or errors.
Ultimately, containerisation can unlock new levels of security, cost savings and developer efficiency within the finserv sector. Most developers are not security experts, but are looking for cost efficiencies when deploying new systems and applications. With containers, they can move things to the cloud at the push of a button, and it will run as a virtual machine. Such capabilities offer advanced hardware security which developers have not traditionally been able to benefit from, restricting cyber criminals entry even if they have physical access to computers.
It’s no surprise then that banks and fintechs are already turning to this technology to protect themselves against increasingly common attack factors, including malware, ransomware and memory scraping.
Cryptography and blockchain
In the next 10-15 years, quantum computers will become sufficiently powerful to break all current cryptography keys, and it’s vital that the finance sector prepares for this development in advance. We are already seeing technology vendors populate their systems with such algorithms, moving from firmware into hardware. When quantum computers advance to the required level of power, businesses will need to decrypt all of their data, and re-encrypt it using new methods such as quantum cryptography.
Blockchain technology, alongside these new cryptography techniques, will also become one of the key security algorithms within the banking and financial industries. Ultimately, the aim is to enable the finserv organisations to operate, test and run analytics without data. The sector also benefits from the number of innovative new players within the space, all of whom will have built their IT infrastructures on non-monolithic systems, and are free of the shackles often caused by legacy systems.
