8 ways finance and IT teams can reduce cybersecurity risks

Cybersecurity is no longer just an IT responsibility — finance teams are increasingly on the front line. According to SAP Concur CFO Insights Research, 59% of CFOs plan to increase their cybersecurity budget, and 50% believe both finance and IT leaders are jointly responsible for driving cybersecurity progress. Yet with at least 50% of all data breaches impacting small businesses, many organizations are still working without a coordinated cross-functional strategy.

[h2]How can finance and IT teams reduce cybersecurity risk?[/h2]

This tip sheet outlines eight concrete steps finance and IT leaders can take together to strengthen data protection, reduce fraud exposure, and maintain regulatory compliance.

[li indent=0 align=left]Build a cross-functional task force. Align IT, finance, compliance, and legal around a shared risk management strategy — integrating cybersecurity policies with financial tools, processes, and controls from the start.[li indent=0 align=left]Ensure transparency to build trust. Define cybersecurity and data privacy requirements at the start of any vendor evaluation and establish clear workflows to monitor suspicious activity in real time.[li indent=0 align=left]Strengthen data access control. Implement MFA, SSO, SAML 2.0, and role-based access controls (RBAC) to limit each user to only the systems and data their role requires.[li indent=0 align=left]Audit your security measures. Conduct regular internal audits and engage third-party auditors to validate security practices and identify gaps before they become incidents.[li indent=0 align=left]Encrypt data in transit and at rest. Verify vendors use AES-256 for data at rest and TLS for data in transit, and hold them to certifications including SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001.[li indent=0 align=left]Create an incident response plan. Define roles for detecting, investigating, and reporting incidents — and run regular simulations to keep teams prepared for real-world security events.[li indent=0 align=left]Build employee awareness. Finance teams are high-value targets for social engineering. Ongoing training, phishing simulations, and a culture of accountability significantly reduce human error risk.[li indent=0 align=left]Prioritize your greatest risks. Conduct a cybersecurity risk assessment to focus resources on the threats with the biggest potential impact — from ransomware and fraudulent transactions to regulatory non-compliance. SAP Concur builds security into every layer of its T&E solutions — with full-stack encryption, continuous monitoring, embedded access controls, and AI capabilities governed by the SAP Global AI Ethics Policy. Critically, your data will never be used to train a large language model (LLM), giving finance and IT teams confidence that organizational data stays private and secure.