In a world where constant access to the Internet has become essential, ensuring optimal network performance is an absolute must for businesses, especially in the financial sector. Service interruptions, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic, represent one of the main problems for 40% of French companies today. Allianz Risk Barometer 2024.
Philippe Alcoy, Cyber Security Specialist at NETSCOUT
This observation highlights the importance of robust business continuity and disruption prevention strategies, critical issues for a sector that is increasingly digitized and at risk of failure. Faced with this reality, the entry into force of DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) in January 2025 reflects the desire of European authorities to strengthen the digital resilience of institutions and guarantee both the stability of systems and the protection of consumers facing increasing operational threats.
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Impact of unplanned shutdowns
For financial institutions, an unplanned network outage can cause a number of problems. For example, they can prevent employees from accessing their work tools, such as trading or investment applications. They can also disrupt customer accounts by blocking their transactions, preventing them from making payments on time, which risks undermining their trust and damaging the institution’s reputation. As customers can easily switch service providers to carry out their transactions, this increases the risk of customer loss.
Moreover, in an industry where the speed of transactions is critical to business operations, just a few seconds of slowdown or outage is enough to lead to the loss of millions of euros, affect employee productivity and above all, damage the customer experience. These disruptions take on added significance when they are transmitted by media and social networks, reaching a wide audience and making it difficult to manage the potential negative impact.
In the event of a prolonged disruption or deterioration of services, financial institutions face severe regulatory penalties and even operational restrictions during the recovery period. Significant breaches can even lead to legal action, especially if customers suffer financial losses. If the customer suffers a financial loss due to late payment, his service provider may be asked to compensate for this loss, but also to pay additional compensation for the inconvenience caused.
With the digitization of the financial sector, where a large number of institutions and platforms operate exclusively online, their teams and their clients are dependent on constant access to applications, anytime, anywhere. So it is up to them to quickly reassess and improve their recovery strategy to minimize the disruption as much as possible.
Ensuring the proper functioning of systems
Although the digital transformation of the financial sector has enabled significant efficiency gains, it has also led to increased complexity of technological systems. Implementation of these new tools requires preventive maintenance and regular updates to ensure optimal operation. By performing regular maintenance checks and updates, organizations can reduce the risk of unplanned downtime, thereby limiting financial losses and reputational damage.
To avoid downtime and related disruptions, IT teams at financial institutions must have a complete view of the threats facing their networks. This allows them to monitor networks and applications regardless of where they are hosted or where users access them.
In addition, cybersecurity managers should conduct proactive simulation exercises to verify application functionality and simulate real-world user traffic to manage and secure the organization’s network. These tests help measure the quality of the customer experience and predict performance issues before they affect end users.
Additionally, early warning and reporting features help quickly resolve service issues and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR). They also make it easier to identify the causes of delays and at the same time recover lost time associated with reordering tickets. It is also advisable to use hindsight tools to build a data store based on past incidents, allowing for more effective management of future challenges. Furthermore, the DORA Regulation will provide, in a single legislative act and for the first time in the EU, a detailed and comprehensive digital operational resilience framework for financial entities.
In short, if service disruptions in the financial sector pose an undeniable danger to companies and their customers, effective measures must be put in place to limit their impact. By carefully monitoring their network and services and implementing planned downtime and regular maintenance, financial organizations can limit the damaging losses that unplanned outages and network outages can cause.