Your staff works hard to serve your community, but at any moment, your banking system could face disruptions—whether from a natural disaster causing an outage or a cybersecurity threat compromising your data—and you need to know how to be prepared for these scenarios. In the event of a system outage, you must understand the potential impact and how your vendor will respond to support your recovery. You need confidence that your core vendor has a solid business continuity plan in place. Simple reassurances aren’t enough. In this post, we discuss how to validate your core vendor’s business continuity plan. Should the unexpected happen, you want to know that your core vendor has a proven plan to safeguard your bank and minimize the impact to your customers.
Validating Your Core Vendor’s Business Continuity Plan
How do you know your core vendor is doing everything possible to make sure you’re protected? To help validate and reinforce your vendor’s business continuity plan, you need to ensure that your vendor has the following:
- A process that keeps your system current and updated to protect your bank from cyber attacks. Financial institutions running legacy software often cannot make critical updates to their infrastructure because the software isn't compatible and can jeopardize their system. Unfortunately, not running updates, especially those that could improve security, leave the operating system vulnerable to cyber attackers. Just one incident can cripple the bank’s operations and prevent its customers from being served.
- A fail-safe procedure that exists in the event of a natural disaster. Does your core vendor have an effective disaster recovery plan? If a natural disaster occurs, how long would it take to recover the data needed to restore operations? It isn't unheard of that during major storms, banks can experience a shutdown, but what truly matters is how quickly and effectively they can bounce back. In many cases, it takes banks several days to fully restore operations, and some may even struggle to recover their data. Make sure your core vendor has a tested disaster recovery procedure with recovery time objectives that are proven to be successful.
- A disaster recovery process that is tested at least annually, with results that demonstrate that operations will be able to continue. Your vendor may tell you they have a business continuity plan and that they’ve handled shutdowns successfully before, but where’s the proof? Incidents happen, but it’s not the incident that matters as much as the outcome. Ask to see the results. Do they have customer participation? How frequently are tests conducted? Have there ever been any unsuccessful tests and what was done to resolve those?
Safeguard your bank from potential loss
To protect your bank during times of uncertainty, you need a core vendor with a strong business continuity plan. Beyond a plan, you need proof that if something does go wrong, your core vendor can respond quickly. At IBT Apps, our clients are at the forefront of our business continuity plan, and we go the extra mile to give them confidence in our decisions. We practice what we preach when it comes to protecting your bank in the event of a disaster because we plan for the unknown. Here is what sets our business continuity plan apart from the industry:
- Our systems are tested and proven. We perform annual disaster recovery testing with our customers for compliance and to also assure our customers that our plan would work as expected should an unfortunate event occur. During this testing, we are able to demonstrate complete business continuity.
- Our integrated systems allow for accurate information. Our technology stack is not siloed, so business continuity is maximized by keeping a bank's data consistent across the enterprise. A bank's data is protected in multiple facilities and on multiple forms of media with special backups made throughout each day. These copies are then removed from internet and network access to further prevent any unauthorized access.
We know community banks are relying on their core partner more than ever to protect their investment. Work with a core partner that adapts and responds to changes in the industry in order to keep your business secure and compliant.
