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 ended – shattered by a data security breach?
- 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 to your ability to do your job. These days, downtime threats are not simply 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 livelihood. 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 There is a common misconception that data is safe if backed up once a day, but this outdated practice is no longer sufficient for several reasons: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 extremely 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.
- If you only back up your raw data, rather than all your application and server configuration files, it could take several days to restore your data because you will also have to rebuild your servers, operating systems and applications.
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. It’s time to safeguard the credibility of your company the same way you safeguard the credibility of your clients. Investing in intelligent business continuity with CompuData and Datto. Have confidence that your practice is protected against any outage resulting from a disaster. Contact us today!