GUIDE

Cybersecurity vs. Cyber Compliance for Financial Firms

See how cybersecurity and cyber compliance work together to protect your firm and support regulatory oversight.

Cybersecurity protects your systems, devices, and data. Cyber compliance helps show regulators and your board that those protections work. Financial firms need both when advisors, employees, and contractors reach business applications from personal devices and depend on third-party providers.

Written for compliance, security, IT, and risk leaders, this guide separates what each discipline owns, where device and vendor risk sit, and how to back your policies with documented evidence.

What you’ll learn

This guide covers how to:

• Distinguish cybersecurity from cyber compliance and assign ownership for each
• Identify the risks you own, including personal and unmanaged devices
• Assess the risks you inherit from cloud providers and critical vendors
• Document monitoring, corrective actions, and risk decisions
• Prepare for SEC and FINRA expectations on incident response and service-provider oversight

Why this matters

Cyber risk changes between annual reviews, and regulators look at how safeguards operate in practice, not only at what policies say.

• Personal devices can reach business applications without meeting security requirements
• Vendor breaches can occur after the most recent assessment
• Split ownership between IT and compliance leaves gaps in accountability
• Annual questionnaires offer a snapshot, not ongoing evidence
• Undocumented risk decisions are harder to support during an examination

Turn policy into proof

The guide includes a side-by-side comparison of cybersecurity and cyber compliance and a framework for managing the risks you own and the risks you inherit. Use it to build the documented evidence that supports board reporting and regulatory reviews.