Finance Monthly September 2019 Edition

22 www.finance-monthly.com FINANCE & BUSINESS - IT OUTAGES As reported in the Financial Conduct Authority survey by Which?, the UK banking sector was hit by IT outages on a daily basis in the last nine months of 2018, demonstrating a higher frequency of major banking glitches than previously thought. Barclays alone reported 41 major incidents during those months, followed by Lloyds Bank with 37 IT failures and Halifax/Bank of Scotland with 31. Whilst TSB only reported 16 incidents, their week-long outage last year cost them around £330m as well as the longer- term impact of the clients lost. Just minutes of downtime can significantly impact the financial sector, which holds the data and funds of millions of customers who are reliant on having access to these services and trust that their assets will be kept safe. To minimise the effects of a disaster and ensure business continuity in case of an IT failure or ransomware attack, businesses must invest in customised disaster recovery services which allow data to be brought back as quickly as possible in case of an outage. Diverting just a small proportion of the cybersecurity budget towards routine IT operations can deliver significant ROI in terms of increased operational resilience. Regular testing and optimisation of backup and recovery systems can deliver big rewards in terms of preventing The financial sector is, and has been for years, a prime target for cybercriminals due to the vast funds and customer information they hold, making them more vulnerable than any other industry. Whilst the prominence of this threat is evident, there is however another far more common and equally dangerous scenario able to cause as much damage to your business as the dreaded ransomware attack. A general IT outage or failure can just as quickly take all systems offline, rendering the whole organisation unable to operate. For example, whilst cyberattacks tend to take over all the headlines, they had nothing to do with the outage at Visa which saw five million transactions fail. Nor were they the cause of the week-long chaos suffered by thousands of TSB customers in 2018. In fact, according to figures published by the FCA, security was responsible for just 119 of 646 operational incidents at financial firms over the course of one year. FORGET CYBERATTACKS; SIMPLE IT OUTAGES COULD BE YOUR DOWNFALL Marie Clutterbuck CMO of Tectrade