With the reliance upon technology for the functioning of all aspects of the financial services industry comes an equally important necessity to ensure that this technology, or the data that it houses, is protected from unexpected disaster. Ensuring that critical business functions are available to customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities that must have access to those functions in such an event, is a constantly evolving challenge for all businesses, not just the financial services industry. However, the knock on effect of a disaster that inhibits the financial services sector from performing its economy-underpinning function would have far reaching negative effects on all aspects of economic activity in the UK and on a global scale.

Resilience is now firmly on ‘the Board’s’ agenda in most organisations but the key challenge for the financial services industry and Intellect is to ensure that technology continues to offer business continuity ‘options’. Outsourced data centres are increasingly in demand within the financial services industry and hosting data off site is increasingly popular as a key strand of business continuity strategy. It is likely that cloud computing will also become a mainstay of business continuity in financial services, however uptake of this service has been slower here than in other industries because of concerns over data security. Of critical importance to all technology-facilitated facets of business continuity is the resilience and continuity of networks – without the means to transmit data to remote locations in times of disaster much of the financial services industry’s business continuity plans would come undone.

Consequently, a key challenge for Intellect, on behalf of its Members, is to create a better understanding within the financial services industry of the role that technology can increasingly play in facilitating more resilient business assurance strategies and where there are misconceptions or concerns about specific innovations, work with industry to allay these fears.

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