As a financial services firm, your clients depend on your guidance to help them make the most out of their fiscal decisions. From accounting to hedge fund management, your clients gain peace of mind when advised properly. These relationships require trust, often built over time.
What would happen if that trust were threatened? How long could you keep your clients at ease if they were unable to retrieve information or make withdrawals? What would happen if you couldn’t get their tax returns filed in time? What would happen if someone’s identity were stolen and you couldn’t access their information to stop it?
In the financial industry, downtime can be detrimental- a deal breaker!
Nowadays, downtime threats are not only weather related. Entire systems can fall victim to ransomware. Individual identities can be stolen. In these instances, your clients will turn to you for financial security. Being able to deliver that service is crucial to your reputation and business’ livelihood. Some financial services firms are turning to business interruption insurance to cover the costs to rebuild, restore, or regain lost income. However, while an insurance provider may write you a check for the cost of a server that gets damaged because of a broken pipe, it won’t shield you from damaged or lost client relationships.
Ultimately, your reputation isn’t something for which you can easily be compensated.
If your company identifies as a business that doesn’t have the IT resources to effectively recover from a major outage, make sure you’re weighing all of the factors around the costs of downtime. The reality is, U.S. businesses lose $12 billion annually due to data loss and 93% of companies that lose their data center for 10 or more days file for bankruptcy within one year. Pretty sobering stuff, right? While you may be taking some precautions, such as securing and backing up your sensitive data, sometimes that’s not enough. There is a common misconception that data is safe if backed up once a day, but this outdated practice is no longer sufficient for several reasons:
- If you forget to perform the backup or the backup process fails, you’re not protected.
- If you only back up your files once a day, you’re left vulnerable to the loss of an entire day’s work.
- If you don’t properly validate your backup files, you could be in for an unpleasant surprise when you actually try to use those files to restore your company’s operations.
- If you only back up your files on-site, you could lose them too—leaving you with no way to meet client requests.
What’s Your Business Continuity Plan?
Whether a business is faced with a natural disaster, or one man-made, a strong solution will have you up and running in minutes. Solutions that leverage the hybrid cloud can guarantee a quicker restore time as well. Why? Local backups are great to keep data stored on local devices, but if something happens to that device, then what? A hybrid cloud backup solution takes an initial backup on a local device, and then replicates the backup to a cloud server. Cloud-only solutions are not as reliable on their own due to bandwidth issues. A hybrid model works to alleviate the
vulnerabilities by implementing both processes to fill in the gaps. That’s intelligent business continuity.
A true business continuity solution will protect your data across on-premises and cloud-based IT environments. Did you know CompuData is a Datto business partner – and can protect your financial services practice against any outage resulting from a disaster? CompuData can protect your business data no matter where it lives with Total Data Protection from Datto. Contact CompuData today!