Finance Monthly September 2019 Edition

53 www.finance-monthly.com FINANCIAL INNOVATION & FINTECH - DATA RECOVERY how can challenger banks avoid making the same mistakes as their more established counterparts? WHY TRADITIONAL RECOVERY FAILS FOR UNTRADITIONAL FINANCE The problem with traditional recovery is that is no matter how it is implemented, there will always be delays of some kind during the process of data restore. Conventional disaster recovery is based on recovery point objectives (RPOs), a metric which quantifies how much data a business can afford to lose, and recovery time objectives (RTOs), which measures how long it will take to recover data. This approach is workable for industries that can afford minor delays in getting data and systems back up and running again. But in the ultra-competitive world of today’s banking industry, organisations have no such grace period, with any period of downtime likely to be fiercely punished. Research shows that nearly half of IT professionals feel they have less than an hour to recover business-critical data before it starts impacting revenue. WHAT CHALLENGER BANKS SHOULD BE LOOKING FOR INSTEAD Challenger banks who want craft reputations for the quality of service and reliability need to instead look towards solutions that can provide true ‘continuous availability,’ where there are no interruptions to usability because data and systems are being replicated in real-time. However, they also need to be incredibly careful that the solutions they are exploring represent true continuous availability and are not just being marketed as such. Many of these imposter solutions use ‘manual failover’, which is when the switchover isn’t triggered automatically and can increase delays and expenses. Many of these solutions are also very narrow in their focus and only protect one or two platforms. Organisations instead need to pursue solutions that can ensure availability for all types of data, whether that data resides in public and private clouds, on-premises or in virtualised environments. They should also search for technologies that use a journal-based approach, which replicates data in real-time at the byte level, as opposed to the traditional snapshot- based approach most commonly found in backup and disaster recovery solutions. In the hyper-competitive world of modern UK banking, it’s vital that challenger banks are seen as nimble, agile and a reliable place to store consumers’ hard-earned money. This is a time of radical change for the industry, and many people are questioning their bank for the very first time. This means that challenger banks have a lot to lose by failing to ensure full, instantaneous data availability, particularly if their competitors manage to do so. If they want to positively differentiate themselves from the established competition, they would be best placed to explore solutions that allow them to sidestep the issue of recovery entirely. This will allow them to provide consumers with the constant access to their money, and their data, that they have now come to expect.