Introduction
The client is a leading provider of investment and wealth management services in the United States, serving over 500,000 clients. They operate a sophisticated IT infrastructure that combines on-premises and cloud-based systems. This setup supports their extensive financial operations, offering a wide range of services tailored to meet diverse client needs. The client’s commitment to innovation and customer satisfaction drives their continuous pursuit of enhancing operational efficiency and security.
Their robust financial solutions cater to both individual and institutional investors, positioning them as a leader in the wealth management sector. Their services include portfolio management, financial planning, and investment advisory services, all designed to help clients achieve their financial goals.
Reason for Collaboration
Operating in the highly regulated financial sector, the client needed to strengthen its security operations to safeguard sensitive financial data. Their hybrid IT environment, spanning on-premises and cloud systems, created inconsistencies in security policies, threat detection, and incident response.
Managing security events across multiple tools led to delayed responses, compliance risks, and operational inefficiencies. To address these challenges, the client was looking for an IT consulting company who can help them in unifying security operations, automating workflows, and improving real-time threat visibility using reliable technology or software.
Challenges
The institution’s security operations faced several critical inefficiencies that increased risk exposure and hindered effective incident response. The absence of automation, integration, and real-time intelligence resulted in delays, misprioritized threats, and inefficient remediation efforts. Below are the key challenges:
Inefficient Security Incident Response
Financial institutions deal with thousands of security alerts daily, ranging from potential fraud attempts to unauthorized access and data breaches. Without automated triage and intelligent threat prioritization, security teams struggled to distinguish critical threats from false positives, leading to delays in responding to real risks. This inefficiency increased the risk of financial fraud and compliance violations.
Inefficient Vulnerability Management & Compliance Gaps
Regulatory bodies such as SEC, FINRA, and PCI DSS require continuous monitoring and timely patching of security vulnerabilities. However, the client needed a real-time risk-based vulnerability assessment framework as currently they were relying on manual tracking which delayed remediation. This left high-value assets and client data exposed to cyber threats and potential compliance penalties.
Limited Threat Intelligence Integration
Wealth management firms and financial services providers are prime targets for financial cybercrime, including phishing, insider threats, and data breaches. However, the client’s security systems operated in isolation from threat intelligence feeds, making it difficult to correlate attack patterns with emerging threats. This reactive approach left gaps in proactive risk detection, increasing the risk of financial and reputational damage.
Lack of Cross-Functional Visibility
Security teams worked independently from IT and risk management, creating silos that slowed containment efforts. Without automated workflows and real-time collaboration tools, incident response became inefficient, leading to delays in containment and regulatory non-compliance risks. The absence of a unified security framework made it difficult to maintain an audit-ready posture and demonstrate compliance to regulators.
Solutions
To address their concerns and provide them with a secure solution, our ServiceNow Consultants recommended implementation of ServiceNow Security Operations (SecOps), a centralized and automated security framework. We provided them with a fool-proof roadmap and implemented SecOps to streamline security operations, automate incident response and enhance threat intelligence capabilities. Below are the key implementations:
Automated Security Incident Response
We deployed ServiceNow Security Incident Response (SIR) to automate incident detection, triage, and resolution, reducing manual intervention and response time.
- Integrated with SIEM tools (Splunk) to enrich incidents with contextual threat intelligence, improving accuracy in identifying critical threats versus false positives.
- Automated escalation and playbooks ensured incidents were prioritized based on risk severity, reducing delays in responding to potential fraud, unauthorized access, and data breaches.
- Enabled real-time tracking of security SLAs, ensuring compliance with SEC, FINRA, and PCI DSS regulations.
Streamlined Vulnerability Management
To eliminate security gaps and enhance compliance readiness, we deployed ServiceNow Vulnerability Response (VR) to automate identification, assessment, and remediation of vulnerabilities.
- Integrated with vulnerability scanning tools (Qualys, Tenable, Rapid7) to provide real-time risk analysis.
- Risk-based prioritization ensured that vulnerabilities affecting high-value financial assets were remediated first, reducing exposure to exploits.
- Automated patching workflows improved efficiency, minimizing security gaps without disrupting critical financial services.
Enhanced Threat Intelligence
We leveraged ServiceNow Threat Intelligence to provide real-time correlation of security events with external threat intelligence feeds, allowing the organization to move from reactive defense to proactive threat hunting.
- Integrated with industry-leading threat feeds (CrowdStrike, Recorded Future, Anomali) for automated ingestion of threat data.
- AI-driven anomaly detection helped identify malicious activity, fraud attempts, and advanced persistent threats (APTs) targeting financial services.
- Created automated response workflows to mitigate potential attacks before they escalated into critical security incidents.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
To break down silos between IT, security, and compliance teams, we established a centralized security operations platform in ServiceNow, enabling seamless cross-functional collaboration.
- Automated incident escalation and task assignment, ensuring all security events were addressed in a structured, time-sensitive manner.
- Implemented predefined security playbooks to standardize response efforts, reducing delays in containment and remediation.
- Provided real-time security dashboards with actionable insights for leadership, ensuring continuous compliance monitoring and reporting.
Benefits
- Automated triage and threat intelligence integration minimized security risks and response times.
- Automated workflows ensured adherence to SEC, FINRA, PCI DSS, reducing compliance risks.
- Centralized dashboards provided actionable insights for better security and risk management decisions.
- Risk-based prioritization ensured efficient allocation of resources, focusing efforts on the most critical threats.
