Financial services organisations are investing heavily in cybersecurity, yet many continue struggling to detect attacks quickly enough, according to new research released by Gigamon.
The findings challenge a long-held assumption within cybersecurity: that deploying more security tools automatically leads to stronger protection.
Instead, the company’s latest financial services survey suggests that a lack of visibility across hybrid cloud environments has become one of the industry’s greatest security weaknesses.
The research found that 94 per cent of financial institutions have invested in new security technologies to improve detection and visibility. Despite those investments, 42 per cent say breach detection is taking longer than before.
More than half point directly to fragmented security tooling as the primary obstacle.
At the same time, AI is reshaping both sides of the cyber battlefield.
While 91 per cent of organisations now use AI-powered security tools and 66 per cent have enabled AI to initiate security actions automatically, attackers are also increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence.
Seventy-seven per cent of respondents reported experiencing an AI-related breach, while 54 per cent observed rising levels of AI-assisted phishing and social engineering campaigns.
The threat landscape is also evolving beyond traditional malware.
Nearly half of respondents reported attacks specifically targeting AI infrastructure and large language models, highlighting how rapidly enterprise AI deployments have become attractive targets.
According to the research, visibility into data in motion is emerging as the industry’s preferred response.
Ninety-five per cent of respondents believe complete visibility across network traffic is fundamental to security, while 94 per cent describe deep observability as foundational to protecting AI deployments.
Rather than relying solely on endpoint, log or event data, security teams are increasingly looking to combine packets, flows and application metadata with traditional telemetry to gain a fuller picture of attacker behaviour.
The report also highlights growing concerns surrounding encrypted traffic.
Thirty-six per cent identified encrypted communications as their largest breach vulnerability, reflecting the growing challenge security teams face when malicious activity is hidden within encrypted sessions.
Meanwhile, quantum computing has moved from theoretical discussion to practical planning.
Nearly nine in ten financial services organisations expressed concern over “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, where threat actors collect encrypted information today for future decryption once quantum computing capabilities mature.
This concern is already influencing cybersecurity strategy.
Ninety-three per cent believe visibility into encrypted traffic will become critical for post-quantum readiness.
For cybersecurity leaders, the findings reinforce an important shift in thinking.
As AI accelerates attack speed, security success may increasingly depend less on deploying additional tools and more on connecting existing sources of telemetry into a unified view that enables faster detection, investigation and response.
