Business Continuity Planning and the Cloud

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    According to a survey from IPC Systems, nearly 70% of investment bank staff has doubts about how prepared London is for the upcoming Olympics. Half of those respondents are unsure of whether their company even has a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) in place.

    One of the fundamental reasons for migrating to Cloud-based solutions is for enhanced BCP capabilities, specifically for Disaster Recovery (DR) of mission-critical systems, which is usually innate in the Cloud solution itself. So if your offices are in London, with Cloud solutions in place, you don’t have to worry about the potential for business disruptions since you can access your systems and data remotely from satellite or home offices (depending on what your BCP provides for).

    It wasn’t surprising in the survey that 76% of asset management companies said they were most prepared for the Games, while their sell-side counter parts, who also not coincidentally rely extensively on in-house systems, were largely unaware of what their capabilities were for BCP from an individual end user standpoint.

    In spite of the vast differences in organizational size and financial resources between sell side firms and buy side money managers, the buy side comes out on top. The fact is that DR is viewed as a mission-critical function within buy-side firms because of their fiduciary responsibility to safeguard client assets, which has been and will continue to be a large factor in the adoption of Cloud solutions for mission-critical systems, such as portfolio accounting and trading.