Safety first: IT outsourcing comes to banks

Professional IT outsourcing can safely, quickly and efficiently support the IT infrastructure even in such a conservative business area as banks.

The expert in production and supply of IT outsourcing for European and Russian customers — CEO of ICL Services Ruslan Vagizov — will tell how can you combine information security and convenience, what specific benefits IT outsourcing can bring for a bank and how can it improve the operating efficiency by applying international standards..

— Perhaps the most pressing question which today the senior management of any bank is facing: how can we solve the problem of information security in practice?

—  IT outsourcing brings a lot of benefits to a company and all questions regarding information security can be solved. If a bank decides to transfer such operations as support of workstations, service desk is or IT infrastructure monitoring to an outsourcer, the security risks are not serious. They are simply minimized by using standard security means.

This, for example, includes restriction of an outsourcer's access to important banking information (critical servers and applications), implementation of access control (single entry point, two-factor authentication, logs) and protection of communication channels (VPN). When it comes to outsourcing such critical systems as ABS or CRM, which process information constituting banking, commercial secrets or personal customer data, the security requirements increase significantly. Leakage of such information represents a very high risk for a bank, both in terms of the implications for business and reputation, as well as from the perspective of violations of the laws and regulations governing banking activities.

— What benefits can a bank get from IT outsourcing?

— he main thing a bank will get from transition to IT outsourcing is the possibility to concentrate all its efforts on core business without performing support functions.

Outsourcing also allows you to reduce the cost of ownership and maintenance of IT infrastructure, thereby reducing the cost of a particular banking service.

There is a noticeable reduction in expenditures for maintaining bank IT infrastructure and increase in its stability. In practice, our company managed reduce the number of high priority incidents from 10 to 1-2 per through the introduction of proactive monitoring in one of the banks. Banks that are just starting to work with outsourcers get a fresh look at the organization of IT service provision. Of course, it is difficult to immediately change the situation: organize the operation of a service desk, ITSM functioning; but at least it is often possible to provide a customer with a competent understanding of current approaches to the organization of effective service and with continued access to technical expertise that a bank does not have.

You can read the rest of the interview, as well as advice for bank before transferring to IT outsourcing on the CNews web-site.