IT Resilience You Can Bank On
Prevent the reputational damage, financial loss and member confusion that goes hand in hand with system downtime.
Digital transformation is a talking point for nearly every company in every industry these days, and the financial industry is no different. However, while all organizations talk a good game about taking steps to digital transformation, fully achieving it is easier said than done. Although the ultimate goal is to improve how the business works on every level, it doesn’t happen overnight and requires a great deal of patience and planning to execute.
Overall, the financial industry is working just fine with employees and customers/members getting what they need most of the time, so why should the industry choose to evolve its IT? Simply put, good enough is not good enough anymore. Organizations must be more efficient, nimble and data-driven to take advantage of business opportunities in a competitive landscape.
In the age where it’s now possible to complete purchases with just your thumb print or even your watch or phone, it’s important that the financial industry always stays available and online. When undertaking a digital transformation, organizations can experience both planned and unplanned outages, and while nearly all financial institutions will have a disaster recovery strategy in place, unfortunately these plans are not enough to ensure banking organizations remain online, regardless.
For example, financial institutions frequently take “scheduled downtime” during the evening to perform systems maintenance, but this has the potential to lead to an updating error or unplanned outage. While scheduled downtime is, by definition, planned for, Wells Fargo recently felt the fallout of an unplanned outage when a data center caught fire and locked most users out of their accounts. As you can expect, in a 24/7 commercial marketplace, these situations cause inconveniences for consumers who want instant access to their sensitive information at any time of the day. To combat this, institutions need to transition to an IT resilient approach, without which they cannot truly be considered an always-on service.
So what is an IT resilient approach?
IT resilience is a way of ensuring your business offers continuous availability, while maintaining the workload mobility and multi-cloud agility that, traditionally, organizations have used during scheduled maintenance. As a result, the financial industry is able to withstand disruption, add in new technology as it becomes available without installation hiccups and work on its digital transformation without any inconvenience to consumers. All in all, it offers a significant advantage – preventing the reputation damage, financial loss and consumer confusion that goes hand in hand with system downtime.
To prevent downtime in the future and achieve IT resilience, the financial industry should make the following a strategic priority for 2019:
1. Invest in technology across all infrastructure platforms. All of the different channels that financial institutions use to talk to consumers will rely on different cloud platforms or virtual environments. All of these need to be protected, which means you need a solution that can work across any number of different locations. At the same time, overarching integration can allow banks to move data to, from and between different infrastructures – minimizing the impact of a specific solution provider’s outage.
2. Prioritize legal requirements. The financial industry is often faced with new legal requirements and the obstacles they present. With this in mind, part of an institution’s resilient approach needs to include the ability to test across the system without causing downtime and prove compliance to the full spectrum of legal requirements.
3. Control costs and improve flexibility with DRaaS. IT systems can end up in flux as teams experiment with different solutions to meet evolving business needs. During the digital transformation process, financial institutions can benefit from taking a flexible, OPEX approach to IT resilience. While a CAPEX approach could incur costly set-up fees, OPEX DRaaS allows banks to deploy the most comprehensive resilience solutions at an appropriate level for the business infrastructure.
Adopting a resilient approach to IT is critical for delivering always-on banking regardless of the size or specialty of the institution. Only with these measures will the financial industry be able to really provide the stability that consumers expect. It’s mission-critical to take a more resilient approach to IT, especially while undertaking a digital transformation.