Financial services businesses have a high degree of responsibility to protect the information that is stored and managed by your organization. Ask yourself this: “Can our business function without technology infrastructure or access to customer data and applications”? If the answer is no, then you should immediately begin work on a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery strategy. Even with robust security measures in place, your staff members are one of the most likely sources of data loss or unauthorized access — making it imperative to protect against the eventuality of a fail. Here are four of the top reasons your financial services business needs to put a backup and disaster recovery strategy in place.
1. Outages Are Not Uncommon
Even a single blink in the power supply to your servers could be enough to cause a waterfall of failures that pervades your business. Downtime happens, whether they are caused by a failure in the technology itself, natural phenomena such as fire or excessive flooding or through human error. When internal staff members and customers lose access to their financial information, there’s a waterfall of failures that can wash through the entire organization. From a massive increase in customer service calls to the delays caused by bringing IT staff along to get a fix in place, there are no winners when you’re unprepared for an outage.
2. Reduced Risk of Compliance Issues
Storing personal financial information requires a great deal of care, making it crucial to have a solid backup process in place. Losing even a few moments of transactional data can take days if not weeks to rebuild and causes frustration that ripples through your customer base. Without the adequate support of a trusted technology partner, you might even find that your lack of a backup and disaster recovery strategy can put your business outside the law in terms of compliance.
3. Prevention is Cheaper Than the Cure
Yes, there is a certain cost associated with the business analysis and implementation of a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery strategy, but that cost is minimal when you weigh it against the cost of recovery after an event. Remediation after a data loss requires immediate assistance and may require calling in additional resources that are working at premium rates to quickly help your business recover. When you don’t have a backup and disaster recovery strategy in place, it’s likely that you’ll uncover additional challenges as you seek to rebuild your critical business systems, too.
4. Uncover and Resolve Resourcing and Productivity Challenges
A side benefit of disaster recovery and backup planning is that you are likely to identify inefficiencies in your processes at a time when you’re able to make plans for resolution over time. This thorough review of your business systems can help improve employee productivity and resource utilization throughout your teams, often uncovering disarray or poorly-implemented business rules that are damaging to your operations. Once these situations have been uncovered, you have a bit more time to schedule measured remediation instead of having to rush into an expensive fix after the fact.
Designing a backup and disaster recovery solution starts with access to a knowledgeable technology partner that can help your IT team and leadership think through the necessary business rules and make recommendations that fit your parameters. At Coretelligent, our technicians and project managers have a great deal of experience working with financial services organizations and have a strong understanding of the various challenges that these businesses face. Contact us today at 855-841-5888 or via email to info@coretelligent.com.
