Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 32 | Page 14

NEWS BNP Paribas commits to joining the IBM Cloud for Financial Services IBM has announced that several global banks, including BNP Paribas, one of Europe’s largest banks, will join a growing ecosystem of financial institutions and more than 30 new technology providers will be adopting IBM Cloud for Financial Services. BNP Paribas has committed to joining the IBM Cloud for Financial Services as an anchor client in Europe to support its first dedicated cloud in Europe to be GDPR compliant, acknowledging that a public cloud informed by IBM’s deep financial industry expertise, controls framework and industry-leading data protection capabilities, meets its exacting standards. BNP Paribas will utilise a dedicated cloud, developed and managed by IBM, that will leverage IBM public cloud technologies, including Keep Your Own Key (KYOK) encryption capabilities. BNP Paribas could plan to onboard additional banking partners to the ecosystem across Europe in the future. “As we continue to expand our collaboration with IBM, we’re driving innovation in the financial services industry and are able to partner with a growing ecosystem of technology providers, from small startups to leaders in the industry. That’s an important step forward for BNP Paribas Group to accelerate its transformation journey and be compliant with European regulations,” said Bernard Gavgani, CIO, BNP Paribas. “IBM Cloud for Financial Services helps us to further our transformation journey to the cloud and migrate mission critical workloads with confidence knowing that we can meet the regulatory standards established for the industry.” UK is fourth most exposed country in the world for cyber vulnerabilities, says Rapid7 research The UK is the fourth most exposed country to cyber vulnerabilities in the world, behind the US, China and South Korea, a report by Rapid7 has found. Rapid7’s National Industry Cloud Exposure Report (NICER) for 2020 also finds that despite significant efforts on the part of the UK National Cybersecurity Centre (NCSC) to encourage exposure reduction across all organisations, the UK’s share of SMB servers has increased by 22% from the same period in 2019. However, the increase in SMB was offset by a 21% reduction in exposed Telnet services and 11% reduction in exposed FTP services. And while the UK has fewer total vulnerabilities per-exposed service/system than other countries, due to continued efforts by the NCSC, these vulnerabilities account for under 38.4% of all exposed surfaces, showing more work needs to be done on the vulnerability management side by organisations and hosting providers. In a time of global pandemic and recession, the report offers a data-backed analysis of the changing Internet risk landscape, measuring the prevalence and geographic distribution of commonly known exposures in the interconnected technologies that shape our world. The research team calculated a country’s risk by measuring the total attack surface, (which reviews how much of a business is exposed to attacks); the total exposure of selected surfaces such as SMB and Telnet (which should never be exposed); the number of CVEs present, as more known vulnerabilities means more exposure; the distribution of vulnerability rates and the maximum vulnerability rate. 14 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com