The competitive landscape has changed. Today’s financial services organisations are fighting a battle on multiple fronts. Non-traditional competition from punchy startups and tech-first organisations has changed the landscape. The focus has become simple, low-cost service. Customers want digital-native experiences on multiple channels, wherever, whenever. But they also want bulletproof security. So how do you go about providing two service qualities fighting against each other? “I want my data to be 100% accessible to me wherever I am, but 100% secure to anyone else.”
Ultimately, what ties this all together is your business processes and the systems infrastructure you’re using to provide it. The reality for most organisations today is that they are relying on a huge array of data siloes sitting in their complex estate of legacy systems to deliver their services. An infrastructure like this is making it impossible to provide reliable service, let alone guarantee security.
The foundations of how you provide your financial services lie within your systems and data. Securing it and eliminating unwanted access is easier said than done, simply because such a large array of individuals will need access to deliver your services effectively, be that vendors, suppliers or any other third party.
However, even though customer and regulatory pressure continues to ramp up, why are so many organisations still so hesitant to react?
For financial services organisations, the path forward is a tricky one to navigate. If you have a fragmented estate of legacy systems, it’s very difficult to keep secure and complex to update. This is a delicate balancing act, and a hurdle that must be overcome to digitally enable your service delivery.
Though the upside is huge, the downside is incredibly important to bear in mind as well. And it’s the magnitude of this downside that makes financial services organisations so risk and change-averse. A breach of security, and, with it, compliance, will incur huge penalties in the form of fines, but also in reputational damages as your customers lose confidence in your ability to deliver the service they demand. As a result, it’s paramount that any transition of infrastructure carefully manages risks like data loss or theft as legacy systems are retired.
So why move to ServiceNow?
The move to digital transformation has become synonymous with the move to the cloud. ServiceNow is a cloud-based platform that is hosted on an infrastructure designed to be highly available with no single points of failure. ServiceNow call this their Advanced High Availability Architecture. They achieve this by arranging all of their data centres in pairs. This way, all customer production data is simultaneously maintained across both data centres in the event of a failure. However, this has other advantages such as being able to actively transfer the operation of a customer instance from one data centre to another in order to carry out maintenance.
Across this infrastructure, security is a top priority, and it is foundational to how the platform has been designed to operate. ServiceNow continually invests in confidentiality, integrity, and availability controls to ensure they are fully aligned with best practice frameworks. This includes a global security team that provides 24/7 threat monitoring and multiple layers of security controls that ensure total global and regional compliance.
ServiceNow also supports data backup and recovery should that be a requirement. The Advanced High Availability Architecture that I have outlined above is the best way of restoring service but there is also a role for more traditional data backup and recovery. For example, should a customer inadvertently delete valuable data or if misconfigurations render data unusable, the high availability aspect would not be much use. Therefore, full backups are run every 7 days and retained for 28 days.
Confidence in security is essential for success within the Financial Services sector. I hope this gives you the insight you need to trust ServiceNow as your technology partner in the future. With this in mind, if you are interested in discussing how ServiceNow can support your digital transformation agenda, please reach out to us at letstalk@crossfuze.com or reach out to me personally at oliver.nowak@crossfuze.com.