Financial services firms hold some of the most sensitive data any organisation manages: account details, transaction histories, personal and financial records that customers trust you to protect. Your customers also expect multi-channel, real-time access to their money and information, around the clock. When something goes wrong with the systems behind that, whether it's a hardware failure, a cyber incident or something as ordinary as a failed upgrade, the gap between a well-tested recovery plan and an untested one becomes very visible, very quickly.
Why does it matter? Business continuity in financial services isn't just an IT safeguard, it's a regulatory expectation and a customer trust issue.
This blog looks at why backup and recovery deserve fresh attention, how one UK building society modernised its approach, and what a strong business continuity setup looks like for a financial services firm today.
Why business continuity carries extra weight in financial services
Every sector cares about uptime, but financial services firms operate under a particular combination of pressures: strict regulatory expectations around operational resilience, customers who expect real-time access to their money, and data so sensitive that even a short period of unavailability can raise questions from regulators, auditors and customers alike.
Our financial sector page sets out how we help firms keep data storage, backup and retrieval processes robust enough to protect data integrity, confidentiality and compliance, and that combination is exactly where business continuity earns its place as a board-level priority rather than a back-office task.
UK regulators have made this expectation explicit. The FCA and PRA's operational resilience rules require firms to know their important business services and stay within agreed impact tolerances, and frameworks such as DORA add a further layer for firms with EU exposure.
We've covered the regulatory side of this in detail in our guide to DORA compliance. This piece takes a more practical angle: what backup, recovery and business continuity need to look like in order to actually meet that bar, not just talk about it.
How West Bromwich Building Society modernised its backup and recovery
West Bromwich Building Society, the UK's seventh largest building society with around 430,000 members, had relied on a legacy data protection setup for years. As that infrastructure approached end of life, the society needed a replacement that removed its dependence on tape backups, protected both its LAN and DMZ environments through a single solution, and could scale alongside its growth plans, all without compromising on security for its members' financial data.
We've provided business continuity services to West Brom since 2007, and worked closely with its IT and architecture teams through a consultative, workshop-led process to design a bespoke solution. Given the sensitivity of the data involved, the society needed everything to stay within its own secure private data centre environment, so we built a solution powered by Veeam that met that requirement while still delivering the granular recovery point objectives the business needed.
Lak Singh, Database Administration Manager at West Brom, said: “Wavenet's backup solution has enhanced the way we manage and monitor our IT backup and recovery strategy on an everyday basis... Wavenet's insight and expert knowledge and experience allowed us to understand the full scope of the benefits and features we were receiving with their solution.”
Read the full West Bromwich Building Society case study for more on how the solution came together.
The result was shorter backup windows, no more reliance on tape, consistent recovery time and recovery point objectives, and real-time reporting through Veeam One, all while keeping every piece of data inside West Brom's own secure network.
What good business continuity looks like for financial services
A resilient setup for a financial services firm tends to share a few features:
- Backups and recovery that don't depend on ageing tape infrastructure or manual handling
- Clearly defined recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) for each critical system
- Coverage across LAN, DMZ, cloud and hybrid environments through one coherent solution
- Data held securely, whether that's within your own data centre or a compliant, UK-based facility
- Real-time reporting and alerting, so issues are caught long before a real incident tests the plan
- Regular testing, so the plan reflects how the business actually operates today, not how it operated when the plan was written
Legacy backup approach vs modern managed business continuity
| Aspect | Legacy backup approach | Modern managed business continuity |
| Backup method | Tape-based backups needing manual handling and offsite rotation | Automated, policy-based backups running continuously in the background |
| Recovery speed | Restores can take hours or even days from tape | Defined recovery time objectives (RTOs), agreed in advance for each system |
| Backup frequency | Fixed daily or weekly schedules | Granular backups, down to every 15 minutes for the most critical systems |
| Visibility | Little insight into backup health until a restore is needed | Real-time monitoring and reporting, so issues are caught before they matter |
| Environment coverage | Separate tools for different environments, including LAN and DMZ | A single solution protecting LAN, DMZ, cloud and hybrid environments together |
| Compliance evidence | Manual, ad hoc reporting pulled together for auditors and regulators | Built-in, consistent reporting that supports regulatory and audit requirements |
| Scalability | Re-architecture often needed as data volumes grow | Scales alongside the business without a redesign |
Backup, disaster recovery and cyber security work together
Business continuity doesn't sit apart from your wider security posture. For Secure Trust Bank, we deliver a 24/7 managed SOC service overlaid across their existing SIEM and MDR solutions, giving them round-the-clock threat detection and response.
Backup and recovery are what let a firm bounce back once an incident happens; monitoring and detection are what reduce how often that's needed in the first place. The strongest setups treat both as part of the same resilience strategy rather than separate projects.
Getting started
- Map out which systems genuinely need the fastest recovery times, and agree realistic RTOs and RPOs for each
- Review whether your current backup approach still depends on tape, manual processes or a single environment
- Check that your backup and recovery evidence would satisfy an auditor or regulator today, not just in theory
- Test your plan at least annually, and after any significant change to systems or operations
- Treat business continuity and cyber security as one resilience strategy, not two separate conversations
Business continuity for financial services in a nutshell
- Financial services firms face a combination of regulatory expectation, customer trust and data sensitivity that puts business continuity firmly on the board agenda
- West Bromwich Building Society replaced legacy tape backup with a Veeam-powered solution that improved recovery times, compliance and visibility, all within its own secure network
- Good business continuity combines defined RTOs and RPOs, broad environment coverage, real-time visibility and regular testing
- Backup and recovery work best as part of a wider resilience strategy that includes cyber security monitoring and detection
Ready to talk about your business continuity setup?
Our business continuity services, including data protection, disaster recovery and operational resilience consultancy, help financial services firms keep member and customer data safe and recoverable.
Talk to us about where your current backup and recovery approach stands, see how we support the financial sector more broadly, or read more customer stories on our case studies hub, customer feedback page and resource centre.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery?
Business continuity focuses on keeping the business running during disruption, while disaster recovery is concerned with restoring systems and data afterwards. In practice, an effective continuity strategy includes disaster recovery as part of a wider plan.
How does business continuity support regulatory compliance in financial services?
UK regulators expect firms to identify their important business services and stay within agreed impact tolerances, and frameworks such as DORA add further requirements for firms with EU exposure. A well-designed, well-tested business continuity solution gives you the evidence and the recovery capability to meet both.
What recovery time objective (RTO) should a financial services firm aim for?
It depends on how critical each system is to your operations. We work with you to define realistic RTOs and RPOs system by system, rather than applying a single target across the whole business.
Can business continuity solutions protect both on-premises and cloud systems?
Yes. Solutions can be designed to protect on-premise infrastructure, cloud platforms, or a hybrid mix of both, which matters for firms like West Brom that need everything to stay within their own secure network.
How often should we test our business continuity and disaster recovery plans?
At least annually, and whenever there's a significant change to your systems or operations. Regular testing is what turns a plan on paper into something that actually works when you need it.
Is business continuity only relevant for large financial institutions?
No. Smaller financial services firms are often more exposed to disruption because they have fewer resources to absorb it, so a scalable, tailored approach matters just as much, if not more.
