IT Compliance issues for Small and Medium Size Financial Institutions

Your business is regulated by the FSA, and as such there are a number of compliance requirements that your IT systems will need to meet, including having a disaster recovery/business continuity plan, having a system for email retention and archiving and potentially recording your telephone calls.

Our many years of working with financial companies ensure that we are aware of the most appropriate solutions on the market place that will cover these requirements, whilst not costing you a fortune.

Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity

Traditionally many disaster recovery solutions were not affordable by SMB’s, but new technology has changed this and we can offer a wide range of cost-effective solutions to recover your IT systems, depending upon the RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective) that your business needs to ensure that it can keep running in the event of a problem.

Many financial services customers choose to have a replica of their key IT systems at our Disaster Recovery suite in Chesham, Bucks. Depending on the business recovery requirement, this can either be replicated in realtime, using technologies such as Double-Take, or a snapshot can be taken of the system each night using technologies from vendors such as Veeam and Symantec. There are options to have your own dedicated disaster recovery hardware or to rent D/R systems from us. In the event of an invocation, we will manage the failover process to your D/R system and provide your users with remote access into it from any internet connected PC. There is also the option in some instances to bring your D/R hardware back to your offices (assuming your premises are intact following the disaster).

We can also provide disaster recovery systems for connection to Pershing, as well as ensuring you can access key pricing systems such as Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters.

Testing plays a vital role in the success of any business continuity plan, and as such we will carry out a D/R test with you at least once a year. From this you will receive a report itemising the actual recovery time achieved for each element of your system, any problems encountered and recommendations for resolving them.

Email Archiving and Management

Managing vast volumes of emails has become an ever increasing problem, especially for those businesses who are FSA regulated and as such have to store all emails for given retention periods.

PST files are not a good solution as they quickly become cumbersome, are prone to corruption and make finding all emails pertaining to a particular subject very difficult. Traditional email archiving solutions such as Symantec Enterprise Vault can offer a very highly functional solution to the problem but come at a cost. Connect Systems LLP can offer alternatives such as ArchiveOne which can be the ideal solution to the problem for smaller businesses.

Call Recording

In many cases financial institutions will be required to record their telephone calls under FSA regulations. Connect Systems LLP can offer suitable call recording systems for ISDN30, ISDN2 and analogue lines as well as SIP trunks. Our systems fully integrate onto your network, to ensure that in the event of a dispute or the need for clarification, you will be able to retrieve the recordings of the relevant phone calls. If in the future you also require the ability to record calls made from mobile phones, then this is something we can also advice on.

Have a look at some of our Case Studies to get a flavour of some of the projects we have successfully implemented.