Developing a comprehensive cyber resiliency approach is a strategic imperative as companies seek to outmaneuver cybercriminals in an ever-evolving digital ecosystem. Today, the question is not whether an attack or security incident will happen but rather when and at what intensity. Preserving customer confidence with resiliency and stability is especially paramount in the financial services sector.
A crucial step in achieving cyber resiliency involves attaining Sheltered Harbor® certification. Sheltered Harbor is a nonprofit, industry-led standards setting and certification organization comprised of financial institutions, core service providers, national trade associations, alliance partners and solution providers dedicated to enhancing financial sector stability and resiliency.
This type of certification can be critical amid relentless cybersecurity challenges. Reported breaches in the middle market have tied a record high in recent RSM research. According to findings in the Q1 2024 RSM US Middle Market Business Index survey, 28% of middle market executives surveyed said their organizations experienced a data breach in the previous year, rising from 20% in 2023 and matching record results from the 2021 RSM survey.
Sheltered Harbor offers a mature three-pronged approach to resilience, recognized by regulators globally as the gold standard for robust resilience and rapid business recovery, helping participating financial institutions survive a devastating cyberattack or severe outage.
Sheltered Harbor resilience standards enable organizations to recover their critical business services quickly, even if backups fail. This helps maintain customer confidence and buys the organization the time needed to restore normal operations.
Obtaining Sheltered Harbor certification indicates that a financial services organization has met rigorous data safeguard standards that enable it to restore essential data and recover critical business services rapidly in the event of a cyberattack, data corruption or other type of failure. This improves an organization’s chance of survival, giving it an edge over those that haven’t enhanced their resilience.
The Sheltered Harbor standards and certification:
- Provide evidence that an organization has taken additional measures to protect their customers, business and the industry from cyberthreats
- Prove that an organization has adopted the prescribed industry-developed safeguards and controls, all of which have been independently assessed for compliance
- Enhance an organization’s resilience, reputation and customer trust that their critical data supporting key business processes will survive a cyber event
