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View All / Six Reasons to Review your Database Availability – Part 4 Regulatory and Compliance Issues

Six Reasons to Review your Database Availability – Part 4 Regulatory and Compliance Issues

Carol Davis-Mann

Carol Davis-Mann

December 11, 2018
Database Availability Triton Consulting

From working with many customers to help keep their critical databases up and running we have come up with the top 6 reasons for putting Database Availability at the top of your priority list. In this blog we look at Regulatory and Compliance Issues:

Regulatory and Compliance issues are of particular interest to the banking and financial services sector. In such a highly regulated sector, organisations are under real pressure to ensure that customers are able to access services.

A widely publicised ruling in 2012 by the Financial Conduct Authority saw RBS fined £56m as a result of software issues which left millions of customers unable to access their accounts. A massive 6.5 million customers were affected by the outage which was caused by a failure in a piece of batch scheduling software.

In 2016, Insurance Brokers feared regulatory action when SSP Worldwide’s Pure Broking platform struggled to trade for two weeks after a power outage. According to SSP Worldwide, 40% of the UK’s brokers use their Pure Broking platform to track insurance renewals. Disaster recovery plans were severely criticised after the event and highlights the need to prioritise availability and recovery planning.

The regulatory and compliance landscape is ever-evolving and with that the risk of financial penalties is growing too. As of August 2018, banks have to clearly set out how many incidents prevented customers from using payment services over a three and 12 month period. Financial firms will have to provide a breakdown of the incidents in terms of their impact on telephone, mobile and internet banking services.

According to research by risk consultancy Control Risks, found that a quarter of large companies spend less than $25 a year per staff member on compliance, which is worrying considering the potential impact that a fine from a large-scale compliance breach can cause.

The IDC predicts that the by 2025 humans will generate 180 zettabytes of data every year. In this climate of growing data and growing regulations, it is vital for organisations to review their database availability plans and procedures.

Find out more in our white paper or take a look at our Database Availability consultancy services.