Your trading operations are critical to your success. So when you experience challenging conditions, it’s vital that you don’t sacrifice anything.

Planning for disruptions like fire, flood or routine ‘outages’ not only makes sound business sense, it is also a regulatory imperative.

Events such as relocating staff also require resiliency planning and how to keep your business running throughout need to be considered.

To add to the mix, the financial sector is also an attractive cyber target. Not only is it lucrative for criminals, it is seen as symbolic by hostile states. A cyber attack can be designed specifically to destroy investor confidence and thereby disrupt the financial markets.

Unfortunately, cyber threats do not need to be sophisticated to cause significant devastation. Malware could easily infect systems in a number of exchanges and clearing houses and then simply corrupt the data over time, infecting backup systems in order to disrupt the interbank clearing system, and the trust associated with it.

The consequences of any of the disruptions listed above can be significant. For equities traders in large trading firms on Wall Street, the number often quoted for downtime during the trading day is $2 million per trader per 20-minute outage.

When key financial applications and transactions are insecure or not available, the impact can be devastating. Loss of revenue, bad press, and as a result of a highly visible security breach, lost customers, is something no-one wants to experience.

BT has resilient solutions that keep the world’s leading financial services companies trading on schedule.

To find out more on how BT can help protect your organisation click here.