Enhancing Cybersecurity in Financial Institutions Through Zero Trust and Cloud Computing Technologies: A Review of Architectures, Standards, and Integration Practices

Abstract

At the same time as the old network boundary has vanished due to remote working, open banking, and third-party integration, financial institutions are shifting critical and customer-facing operations from local to public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. As a result of these parallel moves, perimeter based defense is becoming more and more ineffective, and zero trust architecture (ZTA) is becoming an operational must. This review collates peer-reviewed literature, international standards and regulatory and industry guidance, and explores the potential of integrating zero trust and cloud computing technologies to bolster the cybersecurity posture of financial institutions. It describes the threat landscape anytime a cloud layer is added to the environment, as well as the documented cost of breach from both cloud and non-cloud environments, and reviews the logical components of zero trust architecture as documented in NIST SP 800-207 and the core enabling technologies—identity and access management, micro-segmentation, and continuous monitoring; it explores the shared responsibility model across infrastructure, platform, and software-as-a-service environments; and examines regulatory instruments that increasingly presume both technologies. The review suggests that financial institutions adopt an integrated Zero-Trust Cloud Security model, consisting of a combination of identity, device, network, and data controls – all of which are layered across the shared responsibility boundary and continuously checked instead of once at the perimeter. Researchers examined industry breach cost studies that revealed the cost of breaches was materially lower for organizations with mature zero trust deployments and better-governed cloud environments, while also acknowledging significant implementation hurdles such as legacy core-banking integration, identity sprawl and latency sensitive transactions. The review ends with a roadmap of empirical validation, maturity measurement standardization and governance of AI features increasingly integrated into both zero trust and cloud security tooling.