Can You Take Your IT Resilience Strategy to the Bank?

At the end of November, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published analysis on the state of the financial sector’s IT resilience. At the same time Megan Butler, Director of Supervision – Investment, Wholesale and Specialist at the FCA gave a speech at Bloomberg in London in which she stressed that while the FCA does not expect “zero-failure” in financial services IT, the true test was “how well incidents are managed.”

This follows a year of disruptions, with one of the most notable examples being the TSB IT migration, which resulted in severe disruptions for TSB customers across mobile, web, branch and ATM banking. The call to action was clear: boards need to work towards creating truly resilient financial institutions, “to prevent risks to not just individual customers’ money and data. But for the UK economy.”

The FCA report found that, with outages and attacks on the rise over the last year, nearly half of UK financial institutions do not upgrade or retire old IT systems in time, and only 56% say they can measure the effectiveness of their information asset controls. As such, operational and IT resilience has remained a challenge to date. These findings echo the results of our State of IT Resilience report, which found that 90% of organizations are falling short in their IT resilience preparations.

The good news for the boards of UK financial institutions is that having a comprehensive IT resilience strategy in place can minimize downtime and disruption, even during complicated IT migration processes, and Zerto can help.

The Zerto IT Resilience platform provides three core tenants that can help in ensuring resilience during any digital transformation strategy:

• Continuous availability: to protect financial institutions against any disruption – whether from IT migration, cyber attacks, or other planned and unplanned disruptions – to deliver an always-on customer experience
• Workload mobility: from migrations to consolidations – financial institutions can have the confidence to move application and data workloads with ease, without risk, and be 100% protected along the way
• Multi-cloud agility: to leverage the cloud to accelerate new service delivery, financial institutions need to ensure they have the freedom to choose between different cloud offerings and be able to move to, from, or between clouds to meet customer needs and avoid any cloud vendor disruptions

In addition, non-disruptive testing ensures that boards can confidently report back to the FCA that they are truly IT resilient. Boards can also use the Zerto IT Resilience platform as a fundamental bedrock for building a new company culture around both agility and preparedness, where customers come first, and systems and control failures are things of the past.

To find out how your IT resilience preparations are shaping up against other businesses, try Zerto’s IT Resilience Maturity Benchmark Tool.