The findings of the most recent CityIQ survey of Business Continuity in financial services have been announced. The survey reveals that:
- Testing is down, particularly testing of crisis management plans
- Regulatory oversight is now seen as the number one BCP challenge
- Budgets are up
- BCP staffing in smaller firms has increased significantly
- Over 90% of firms now use off site data centre space or hosting to improve resilience.
- The use of cloud technologies as part of recovery strategies is increasing
- Many smaller firms do not check that their BCP process is fit for purpose
“The survey has lots of detail and gives a great snapshot of what is happening in the industry”, commented Paul Wiltshire, Director of CityIQ. “However I’d like to highlight just a couple of findings. Firstly although we are seeing increased investment in BCP at the same time it seems that testing activity is down. We suspect that this might be caused by ‘test fatigue’ amongst senior management or else a misplaced belief that live use of technologies such as remote access negates the need for testing in a BCP scenario. Either way it’s a worry.”
Similarly, whilst resources applied to BCP appear to be increasing in smaller firms, almost half of them are not carrying out any health-checks or benchmarking of the BCP process on which these resources are employed. Again it’s a concern”
Results
To obtain a free copy of the report please contact CityIQ on: +44 (0) 207 073 2925
or visit http://www.cityiq.com/reports.php
Survey Methodology
Between April and July 2014, invitations to complete an on-line survey were sent to over 1000 individuals in over 100 institutions. Forty five responses were received from a cross section of financial services organisations in the UK and overseas. The on-line survey was complemented by face to face interviews with a sub-section of the survey population.