Manoj Kanodia, CEO, Inspira Enterprise explains why organisations need a strong cyber security to succeed, during an interview with Himali Patel. Edited excerpts.

The crisis impacted most sectors adversely including IT, though to a lesser extent. Areas that saw increased spending include business continuity solutions, remote working, and workforce collaboration tools like Desktop as a Service (DaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Virtual Private Network (VPN) and managed security. Cloud computing, because of its flexibility, reliability, and security, has emerged as one of the saviours during this pandemic. Various collaboration tools helped people to stay in touch with their family members as well as have conference meetings and work at the same time.

Digitalisation became central to every interaction as organisations and individuals were forced to adopt it overnight.

The pandemic is accelerating demands for new banking technologies and cost-cutting efficiencies.

The opportunities and threats banks needed to prepare for is approaching fast.

The customer-engagement is through digital channels and productivity is driven by process automation. New technologies like Cloud will drive banking transformation in the next 5 years. It will allow banks to operate with agility and speed. Banks will leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create a seamless customer onboarding journey.

Financial technology (Fintech) is driving the new business model. Digital transformation is at the mainstream and hence banks should update their IT operating model to get ready for the ‘new normal’. The banking sector is the backbone of the economy. Thus, creating an agile and highly resilient threat prevention mechanism for financial institutions is need of the hour. ‘Customer intelligence’ is important for revenue growth and profitability. Hence, BFSI will look at analysing big data using different analytic tools to know about the customer’s needs.

With the acceleration in digitisation, the risk horizon has been elevated and the potential of breaches increased substantially.

An organisation going fully digital needs to balance three elements:

(1) technology that is flexible and cloud-based,

(2) governance and risk management frameworks to meet the needs of regulators and customers, and

(3) purpose and passion to show things can be done differently from what has been done traditionally.

Organisations need to work on scenario planning for various contingencies to enable themselves, overcome adversity, and deliver customer expectations.

Technology investments will not be successful unless there is a strong foundation where employees are aware of of cyber security. It is important to show customers what steps are taken to avoid hackers and keep their data and money safe.

Lastly, digital risk management should be an essential part of business management. Since banking and other finance organisations come under the regulatory ambit, data protection strategy should address the requirements of transparency, audit ability and completeness.