Taking your Financial Services firm from a Cinderella story to a #1 seed.

My friends called me out after I finished eloquently telling them I knew Loyola Chicago would make it this far, how I have followed them all year and I saw this coming. No one believed me…

Aren’t teams like this the real reason the tournament is so much fun?  The great Cinderella story, a team coming out of nowhere to beat the traditional power house teams.

Loyola prepared for the tournament by believing in themselves and each other, being focused on what they all did well, and bringing that passion and faith in themselves to the tournament.

After watching their game this weekend, I’m a believer.

We couldn’t have scripted Loyola’s wins or defense any better.  They epitomized the four pillars of great defense in last weeks blog.  We discussed the first two and how those lessons learned on the court translated to lessons we can bring to our financial services firms security strategy.

Team defense or Prevention

Practice and help defense or Detection and Response

Today, lets dive into the final two:

Communication or Integration and Automation

Knowing your opponent or Intelligence.

Integration and Automation

In Basketball; defenses are at their most effective when every member of the team is communicating with the other members, calling out offensive movements, switching and moving on screens, moving to the open space and letting your team know your there so they can move in and pressure the ball more.

Financial Service firms must reduce the burden on teams while accelerating the time to detect and respond to threats.  An integrated threat defense starts with products that have some automation in their own right, but that also work seamlessly together for automated security across the integrated architecture.

Automation can be the force multiplier, helping make IT more effective and productive.  Having a force multiplier that can quickly, easily, and intelligently take action across all of your security solutions, can allow for more focused efforts where they are needed most.

Intelligence

My favorite part of watching a great defensive team play is they rarely allow the same offensive set to disrupt the defense twice. They make in game adjustments to be effective.  But they dont solely rely on what unfolds before them.  These teams study their opponents and learn their tendancies. Watch obsure games to see what schemes they run and not just the games on national tv.

Similarly; Financial Service firms should look not only at its own data, but also at the data from your trusted sources and open source communities, to understand attacks from all angels.  Your network needs to learn from every attack, and prevent them before they even get started.

Let Cisco help you go from a great Cinderella story to that number 1 seed.

Explore this website for more information and tune in again next week, for more on Cisco’s security for Financial Services, I can’t wait to watch this weeks games!  Talk to you all next week

www.cisco.com/go/fsi