The Always-On, Always Ready Financial Institution – 6 Steps to Operational Resilience

Operational resilience and financial services organizations

Financial services operational resilience refers to the ability of financial services firms to prevent, adapt, and recover from disruptions to their critical business operations. This may include disruptions to IT systems, physical infrastructure, or other critical components of the organization's operations. Strong operational resilience is essential for the stability and reliability of the financial system, as it ensures that organizations can continue providing essential services to their clients, even in the face of major disruptions. This is particularly important for the financial services sector that provides critical services, such as payments and settlements. By being operationally resilient, financial services organizations can reduce the likelihood of disruptions and improve their ability to recover from them, ensuring the stability and reliability of the financial system.

Steps to ensure operationally resilient IT systems

1. Implement robust risk management processes to identify and assess potential IT disruptions and develop strategies to prevent or mitigate them.
2. Develop and regularly test contingency plans to ensure you can continue providing essential services during an IT disruption.
3. Invest in redundant and resilient IT systems to reduce the likelihood of disruptions and improve the bank's ability to recover from them.
4. Regularly train staff on IT operational resilience procedures and maintain strong communication channels, ensuring everyone knows the plan and their roles and responsibilities during a disruption.
5. Regularly rehearse your plan with drills and exercises to test the bank's IT operational resilience processes and identify areas for improvement.
6. Work closely with regulators and industry organizations to stay up-to-date on best practices and emerging threats while regularly updating your plan based on organizational and regulation changes.

Listen to this podcast for incident response plan best practices.

Overall, a strong focus on IT operational resilience can help organizations like yours prevent or mitigate IT disruptions and ensure they can continue providing essential services to their clients.

IT operational resilience through business continuity, disaster recovery, and backup and recovery

Business continuity, disaster recovery, and backup and recovery are all important components of IT operational resilience for financial services organizations. Let's take a look at how each strategy and process helps you continue to provide essential services to your clients during an IT disruption.

• Business continuity refers to the processes and procedures you put in place to ensure your organization can continue providing essential services during an IT disruption. This may include implementing redundant and resilient IT systems, regularly testing contingency plans, and training staff on how to respond to IT disruptions.
  
• On the other hand, disaster recovery refers to the processes and procedures put in place to restore your IT systems and critical data after an IT disruption. This may include having a secondary site or backup systems in place that can be brought online in the event of a disruption and processes for quickly restoring data and systems.
  
• Backup and recovery, meanwhile, refers to the processes and procedures your organization uses to create regular backups of its critical data and restore it in the event of a loss. This is an essential component of disaster recovery, allowing your organization to recover from data loss due to disasters, human error, or other causes.
  

Overall, business continuity, disaster recovery, and backup and recovery all help provide IT operational resilience for financial services organizations by ensuring that the organization can continue providing essential services to its clients, even in the face of major IT disruptions.

Veritas Technologies and operational resiliency

Veritas Technologies provides consulting and training to help financial services organizations develop and implement effective operational resiliency strategies.

Download The Always-on, Always Ready Financial Institution whitepaper for additional strategies to ensure your organization's availability and resiliency.