Crucial Digital Resistance Maintains Client Confidence in Financial Services
Published on September 18, 2024
Written by Ian Waters, Senior Director, EMEA at Cisco ThousandEyes
In today's digital age, the financial sector faces a significant challenge: providing exceptional digital experiences across enterprise, internet, and cloud networks. This is no longer a differentiator, but a necessity for achieving business outcomes.
The financial services sector, a leader in adopting digital innovations, is increasingly relying on unowned infrastructure and environments. This reliance, however, comes with its own set of challenges. Every minute of downtime can impact brand perception, loyalty, and customer trust.
To address these challenges, close interaction and joint efforts between financial services companies and their ICT third-party service providers are required. The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), set to take effect in January 2025, aims to strengthen IT security in the financial sector and ensure its resilience in the event of a severe operational disruption.
DORA expands the scope of regulations to include crowd-funding providers, crypto-asset service providers, and ICT third-party service providers. These providers, such as cloud service providers, data center operators, software providers, and other external ICT service suppliers, are now part of the planning, testing, management, and reporting process.
The internet is the delivery mechanism for mission-critical customer and employee applications in the financial sector. Without the ability to assure user experiences across external environments, organizations risk costly downtime and reputational damage. New approaches to digital assurance and third-party visibility are necessary to comply with DORA.
Fortunately, the network technologies used to control end-to-end digital experiences can also help achieve DORA compliance. DORA mandates organizations to conduct a mapping exercise to identify important business services and their dependencies, both internal and external.
Proactively addressing network disruptions and preparing for DORA can lead to digital resilience for financial services institutions. Achieving digital resilience can help secure the digital future and reassure customers of the priority given to their financial well-being. Trust remains the most important factor in the financial sector, and digital resilience can help maintain that trust.
DORA sets out expectations on organizations in terms of management, testing, and reporting of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) issues. Compliance with these expectations can help ensure the financial sector's continued growth and success in the digital age.
