FSTC extends business continuity benchmarking project

The Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC) has announced that 15 leading financial institutions and technology companies have undertaken its Resiliency Model Project, whose goals are to create, for the first time, benchmarks for operational resiliency traversing all areas of a financial enterprise.

“Financial institutions clearly recognize the importance of having plans and methodologies in place to ensure business continuity in the event of an unforeseen circumstance or disaster,” said Dan Schutzer, executive director of FSTC. “Currently, there are no industry-wide benchmarks against which institutions can measure their resiliency performance and make investment decisions. The results of this effort will be invaluable to the industry going forward.”

This project addresses the critical need for institutions to adequately plan and measure their resiliency activities against a set of industry standards and establish a process improvement roadmap.  This project is a follow-on to the Business Continuity Compliance project that concluded in June 2005 and the Resiliency Model Project Phase I which concluded in November 2005. The Business Continuity Compliance project clarified a confusing web of 100 global continuity regulations, standards and guidelines affecting US financial institutions. The team analyzed content, identified commonalities and differences, and examined trends. Phase I of the RM project identified and documented the essential capabilities of operational resiliency, developed a road map toward an eventual process improvement framework, and began the process of creating a common resiliency taxonomy, outlined a process improvement framework for resiliency capabilities, characteristics and goals of sustainability management, and defined resiliency terminology.

The second phase of the RM project will continue the team’s groundbreaking work.  The participating institutions will work together to document the goals and practices of vital operational resiliency processes and develop a draft process improvement framework.  The second phase of the Resiliency Model initiative will also develop requirements for resiliency metrics and measurements and explore ways in which the process improvement framework can be used to assess an organization’s operational resiliency capability.  The overall goal of the Resiliency Model project is to define a process improvement approach for operational resiliency that a full spectrum of industries and organizations can utilize to improve their security, business continuity, and resiliency efforts.

“The level of interest in this important project has been outstanding,” said Charles M. Wallen, managing executive of FSTC’s Business Continuity Standing Committee, and project director. “Financial institutions and their technology solution providers have joined forces to work together to develop a methodology that will allow organizations to measure and monitor their resilience against a common standard.”

FSTC has partnered with the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. The SEI’s CERT Program is conducting applied research in the application of process improvement techniques to information security and operational resiliency. 

•Date: 7th March 2006• Region: N.America • Type: Article •Topic: Financial sector
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