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Stricter legislative requirements and shareholder activism around security and corporate governance have led many companies to invest in services that provide robust business continuity (BCP) and disaster recovery (DRP) plans.
The financial services industry is no exception, according to outsource group FinSource. A year ago, FinSource commissioned its IT services subsidiary, FinSolutions, to develop an off-site DR facility, principally for its outsourced administration service to clients in the fund management industry. Now the uptake of DR services by clients themselves is gaining momentum, according to Mike Jenkins, Business Development Director of FinSolutions.
"The world over, auditors are increasingly required to examine the adequacy of continuity and recovery capabilities. Fully-tested disaster recovery plans are essential to provide business continuity in the face of site-level disasters or civil disturbance," says Jenkins.
"In today's connected, data-driven economy, the loss of business momentum is compounded in the case of a disaster, with so little downtime tolerance for companies in our industry that they require an immediate switch over to a duplicate system."
"If a client's operations were halted by a disaster, not only are systems replicated in their entirety at the FinSolutions DR facility, but staff can be moved over and continue working within a few hours of the disaster, thus ensuring business continuity."
FinSolutions recently secured eCentric Switch as a client for its disaster recovery and business continuity services. eCentric Switch provides an electronic switching service for clients across the postal, public, telecommunications, retail and financial services sectors, switching more than half a million transactions per month. One component of its business includes the switching of electronic vouchers for clients such as the post office and retailers that sell pre-paid products to customers.
eCentric Switch MD Mike Scott says that business continuity is vital in such a real-time service. "Most of our clients are online, real-time service providers, who need to provide 99.99% uptime to customers. A consumer buying airtime at a Post Office, Shoprite or Checkers counter does not want to be told that the product is unavailable because a system is down."
Another eCentric Switch client is FinSwitch, the industry platform for electronic trading and switching of unit trusts by management companies and linked investment service providers. In this instance, eCentric Switch provides the financial switching to effect settlement with the banks, while FinSwitch acts as the transactional switch to carry out the switching instructions and reconciliation.
Other eCentric Switch applications include third-party payments for parastatals, the financial switching for Equinox, the online retail unit trust trader, and the switching of debit and credit card requests into the banks.
"Regardless of the application, eCentric Switch needs both DRP and business continuity services. All our services are duplicated and hosted at the FinSource DRP facility in real-time. Furthermore, if for some reason our people were unable to work at our eCentric Switch offices, our entire operation could be continued at the FinSource off-site environment", says Scott.
eCentric Switch moves to new premises
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