Introduction
The time is approaching once again for Swift member institutions to complete their annual mandatory Swift CSP audit. As a quick refresher, the Swift Customer Security Programme (CSP) audit is an annual security assessment that all Swift members must complete to remain compliant with Swift security protocols and ensure the safety of the Swift network. For more information on the Swift CSP and how your organization can best complete it, click here.
There are many questions to be answered and controls to be validated throughout the CSP process, with supporting evidence to be provided to complement each answer. As you can imagine, providing such evidence means exchanging large amounts of sensitive company information over channels such as email, direct messages, or shared drives. The CSP process is often predominantly manual which can be time-consuming, inefficient, and in some cases, unsafe. And like any manual process, a lack of automation can result in this mandatory exercise becoming disorganized and frustrating very quickly. Depending on the size of the organization, the level of disorganization can grow exponentially. If there was ever a need for optimization within a process, the CSP assessment would be near the top of the list.
As with most manual processes, organizations would benefit from optimizing and automating parts of their CSP process to make the requisite work easier, safer, and more streamlined. In this Part 1 article of our CSP assessment automation series, we make the case for why organizations should consider optimizing their Swift CSP process, and the myriad benefits to be gained from choosing such a path for their assessment in 2024.
Why Automate Your CSP Process?
1. Reduced Time Investment
Assessments can be time-consuming considering the amount of evidence an organization is required to provide for each security and operational control. Sharing critical company information via traditional communication channels such as email can come with challenges – something as simple as keeping track of the chain of communication and following up could require hours of valuable time. A platform that allows for evidence to be securely uploaded and for the chain of communication to be automatically updated can save countless hours for the party responsible for completing the assessment.
2. Cost Efficiency
Optimized time leads to optimized costs. Streamlining and automating many of the labor-intensive processes involved with mandatory assessment completion gives money back to organizations by freeing up critical resources to focus on core business activities.
3. Enhanced Collaboration
Inter-departmental collaboration is a key component of mandatory assessments. Various departments are tasked with providing the necessary role-based evidence to supplement the assessment completion. This can be hindered when using traditional collaboration tools as they are not optimized to support the requirements for completing an assessment of the CSP nature. Instead, a dedicated platform can enable the storing of all evidence within a central repository with access permissions granted to all required teams, thereby improving the inter-departmental collaboration process through a single-window solution.
4. Improved Organization
It goes without saying that when multiple documents and communications are being shared across various lines of business, organization becomes paramount. An automated platform can provide a centralized repository that enhances the ability to organize data, streamline communications, and establish a checklist of tasks to be completed.
5. Increased Accuracy
CSP assessment automation affords organizations a much-improved chance of accuracy in their information gathering and final results. In general, minimizing manual processes can greatly reduce the risk of human error. In the case of a mandatory security assessment, the increased accuracy of a process-optimized system can mitigate the risk of any potential negative consequences of an assessment being completed inaccurately.
6. Heightened Security
Given the large amounts of sensitive company information being exchanged, it is important that this information is maintained under strict access controls. There are several security factors to be considered when completing an assessment:
- Security roles and permissions are necessary to ensure that data access is protected
- View and modify rules should be defined that comply with the organization’s security policies.
- Data stored should be encrypted to mitigate any potential cyber-attacks.
A centralized assessment platform can provide the necessary mechanisms to meet each of these requirements and ensure the secure completion of critical assessments.
Conclusion
As illustrated above, there are many manual processes involved in completing a security assessment. An optimized and automated assessment solution can minimize friction and inefficiencies, enabling improved collaboration, organization, security, and expense management for organizations completing mandatory assessments.
Axletree has a solution that we are proud to present to the market this year, as a value-add for all institutions completing the Swift CSP assessment – our very own assessment optimization tool, RADAR by Axletree®.
Stay tuned for Part 2 to learn more about RADAR and the benefits it presents to organizations completing the Swift CSP audit in 2024. If your organization would like to get a head start on completing the assessment, learn more about how Axletree can help by reaching out to our expert team here! We would be more than happy to chat and help you complete your assessment in the most efficient manner possible.
June 7, 2024
