ICM to issue Voluntary Risk Statement to clients
The report found that, although IT arrangements for firms operating in the financial sector are very resilient, there is a heavy geographical concentration of primary and recovery sites in and around London. Follow up work by the tripartite authorities will explore this issue. ‘We need to understand more clearly how firms can mitigate this risk, for example by being able to switch business to offices with a low likelihood of concurrent disruption. The data also confirms a high degree of reliance on financial infrastructure providers, on British Telecom and on recovery service providers for back-up workspace. These concentrations are not unexpected but firms and providers could do more to increase transparency over information and co-ordinate more closely on planning and testing’, says the report. In an appendix to the Resilience Benchmarking Project report, the Tripartite Authorities published a sample Voluntary Risk Declaration form which business continuity suppliers can use to provide information about syndication levels at their various recovery facilities. ICM has stated that it will issue a Voluntary Risk Statement based on the Voluntary Risk Declaration form to its clients during January. Mike Osborne, operations director of ICM said: "We welcome the Tripartite's views on syndication rates and believe that as a major supplier it is in the interests of a professional industry that we adopt the policy. "The growing threat of wide-area incidents such as extremes of weather and last July's attacks in London are changing the risk dynamics of our industry and business continuity providers have a genuine responsibility to their clients to make it clear exactly how many subscribers are syndicated to a particular service and where those clients are based. After all, what use is a plan if you can't use it when you most need it? "Clients should not only demand hard facts about subscription rates from their suppliers but also act on these where there is a valid concern."
•Date: 10th Jan 2006• Region: UK • Type: Article •Topic: BC markets |
