Introducing the CSA Financial Services Working Group

At our annual CSA Congress today, the CSA is pleased to introduce the new Financial Services Working Group (FSWG), which aims to provide knowledge and guidance on how to deliver and manage secure cloud solutions in the financial industry, and to foster cloud awareness within the sector and related industries. It will complement, enrich and customize the results of other CSA WG in a way to provide a sector specific guidance.

Why a financial services working group?

Financial services organizations have specific, often unique requirements regarding security, privacy and compliance. The Financial Services Working Group’s main objective is the identify and share the challenges, risks and best practices for the development, deployment and management of secure cloud services in the financial and banking industry.

Research from this working group aims to accelerate the adoption of secure cloud services in the financial industry by enabling the adoption of best practices by:

• Identifying and sharing the industry’s main concerns regarding the delivery and management of cloud services in their sector.
• Identifying industry needs and requirements (both technical and regulatory)
• Identifying adequate strategic security approaches to ensure protection of business processes and data in the cloud.
• Reviewing existing CSA research and identify potential gaps from the financial services standpoint.

Initial Research

As part of its charter, the group expects to publish four key pieces of research related to the financial services industry:

1. A survey of existing & potential cloud solutions (products and services) in the banking and financial services sector
2. Technical and regulatory requirements in the sector
3. Identification and assessment of risks in cloud solutions in the sector, including interaction with other approaches such as mobile computing, social computing, and big data.
4. Recommendations and best practices of cloud solutions for the sector.

For more information about the working group, visit https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/research/financialservices