Ensuring Operational Resilience in Financial Services

Each year, financial services organizations handle billions of transactions, through which trillions of dollars of commerce flow. Customers expect key services, from online banking and cash transfers to payroll services, to be available around the clock, just as they expect their assets, data, and identities to be kept secure. Meanwhile, financial institutions themselves must be able to maintain ongoing communication with clearing houses, stock markets, payment processors, and other relevant parties.  

To keep pace with these demands and maintain operations, many of these organizations put their trust in the ScienceLogic platform for complete peace of mind. When it comes to ensuring business continuity and security, financial services organizations must have modern technology in place for complete visibility to track and protect against cyberattacks, hardware and software failure, and disruptive downtime.  

Operational resilience, the ability to provide uninterrupted mission-critical services—even in the face of cyberattacks, natural disasters, technical errors, and other disruptions— is mandated for financial institutions through regulations such as GDPR in the E.U., PIPEDA in Canada, and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework in the U.S.  

Failure to comply with such regulations can be costly. For example, Danske Bank was fined €1.35 million under GDPR last year in the wake of a data breach. When systems are offline, financial services companies also miss out on precious revenue, while placing customer trust and their organization’s reputation at risk. Altogether, ensuring operational resilience through modernized network management is vital to these financial services organizations.  

The Four Pillars of Operational Resilience  

Regulators across the globe—including the Basel Committee, the Federal Reserve, and the Bank of England—have outlined four key components of operational resilience in financial services: 

1. Identify critical business services (services for which disruption would cause intolerable harm to customers or jeopardize market integrity); 
2. Establish impact tolerance (the point at which critical services become unavailable); 
3. Test network resilience (including demonstrating adequate backup tools and the means for swift recovery); 
4. Communicate disruptions to stakeholders, (including regulators). 

Of course, these pillars represent the starting line for operational resilience—not the finish line.  

In addition to identifying critical business services, for example, organizations must also ensure they have complete visibility into them. Enter: the ScienceLogic platform. With total observability across their entire IT ecosystem and infrastructure, real-time data ingestion, and smart analytics, financial service organizations can establish a baseline for operations and ensure continuous monitoring to uncover their impact tolerance. 

Once impact tolerance is established, tools should be implemented to keep operations within that level of services availability . For network resilience to pass the requisite tests, organizations need a centralized network, powered by automation.   

More specifically, process automation uses real-time analytics to support rapid decision-making and achieve resilience goals. This ensures the fast, accurate execution of vital tasks, such as: network monitoring across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures; root cause analysis and incident response and remediation; configuration assessments and audits; system backup and disaster recovery; predictive analysis and maintenance; CMDB update and synchronization; compliance and health checks; and change management.  

The ScienceLogic platform can support financial organizations through each function and more, helping achieve powerful automated incident management to maintain critical operational resiliency. 

Operational Resilience in Action 

Automating key processes—and in turn improving operational resilience—can be supercharged through artificial intelligence (AI). With the ScienceLogic platform, firms can automate critical processes, observe asset health and activity across their entire IT infrastructure (including multiple clouds), dramatically reduce network audit effort, improve availability, and meet required regulations. 

In one instance, a client was able to consolidate operating models from four different geographies into a single shared service center. This reduced the mean time to respond (MTTR) by 40% and reduced Priority 1 and Priority 2 issues by 25%—both metrics that speak to greater operational resilience. Another bank—one of the largest in the U.S.—implemented SL1 to improve visibility gaps, particularly at branch banks.  

With a centralized network powered by automation, financial services organizations have total control over network access. Better yet, they have a single space where data is stored, encrypted, and secured—and where backup processes and configurations can be managed. With compliance performed at the point of backup, audits can be performed more often. Automation also helps minimize manual errors, which account for most network outages. 

The Bottom Line 

For financial services organizations, preventing outages and ensuring operational resilience is non-negotiable—and mandated by law. The time is now for banks and other financial institutions to ensure their networks are centralized, automated, and secure. Downtime, data breaches, and other disruptions can be extremely costly—Morgan Stanley, for one, was previously fined $1 million by the SEC for failing to protect customer data—and damaging to the company’s operations and reputation. The good news is that AI can be leveraged to improve operational resilience around-the-clock. In turn, critical services stay online, customer data stays protected, transactions can be executed without delay, and companies stay compliant. 

To learn how the ScienceLogic platform can help your financial services organization ensure operational resilience, book a demo today.