The Definitive Guide to Disaster Planning for Banks

Overview

The guiding principle for achieving business resilience for banks is to prepare and adapt to emerging threats, the dependencies and requirements for providing comprehensive critical business services across an organization, and the more widespread economic as well as company-specific impact of disruption events. 

Particularly in today’s world of increased cybersecurity risk, it is critical to identify the gaps in your business continuity plan and determine how you can close those gaps before a disaster strikes. In addition, Sarbanes-Oxley requires business leaders to ensure that internal controls will protect the organization from fraud. If parts of your infrastructure are down, that can be a difficult promise to fulfill. Regularly examining and testing your disaster readiness will help your bank be prepared for any kind of disruption. It will also ensure that you can bring systems back online quickly and efficiently.

We work in a world today where automation and connectivity are crucial to smooth business operations. Many information technology systems are virtual and many applications and databases are in the cloud. These are competitive strengths when they’re working, but when electricity and telecommunications are down, all these systems come to a halt.

Testing of information technology recovery and restoration is all the more vital in today’s digital world. Having regular back-ups, redundant infrastructure, and a disaster recovery partner who can relocate your operations to a fully stocked mobile branch, or other temporary space, are all competitive advantages in a crisis situation.

As the most recent hurricanes showed us, lack of access to financial institutions makes it difficult for people to recover from crises in a timely fashion. Following these events, people were hurt, hungry, and had nowhere to go. As a bank, your organization should ensure that situations such as these don’t happen again to the communities you serve. No matter the circumstances, disasters don’t have to shut down your bank. Proper planning and testing mean your organization will have minimal if any, downtime during a crisis. Take steps today and put your testing procedures in motion