While this is in many ways a golden age for financial professionals, it is also a time of great risk and complex compliance demands. As a result, commercial lenders, financial brokers, advisors, insurance companies, M&A advisors and even wealth management firms are beginning to move away from in-house IT to take advantage of the greater expertise that managed IT providers such as Highway 99 can offer.
Perhaps the biggest challenge most financial professionals face is navigating an ever more burdensome regulatory environment. Worse, they have to do this while trying to take advantage of the enhanced efficiency and collaborative possibilities of today’s information technology. Keeping up with changes in regulatory compliance alone is enough to give in-house IT teams nightmares.
Our specialist teams have the technology, experience and talent needed to keep your systems online, secure and operating within all national and international guidelines. With that peace of mind, you can spend your time on growing your business once again.
Would you like to see how smoothly we can get the IT side of your operations running?
Our team’s regular working hours are weekdays 7am to 6pm, and we are available to handle emergencies 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Cloud services are just as vulnerable to human error, data losses and attacks as on-site systems. In fact, you may be even more vulnerable if your cloud services are inconsistently updated or incorrectly configured relative to the needs of your industry.
Highway 99 can ensure that your cloud services are configured correctly, that access is restricted to the people you intend to use the system, that all important updates are conducted in a timely manner, and that all of your data is backed up regularly. This won’t make you immune to computer problems, but it will protect you against known threats.
We want to learn what you need from a managed IT provider. How do you use technology? What are the issues with your current set of solutions? What potential changes to the compliance environment are keeping you up at night? Only once we really understand your situation can we start talking about how to make it all work better, and get ahead of the next set of regulatory changes.
There has been a spike in cybercrime recently, and it should worry everyone, not just financial professionals. That said, the sheer volume of funds and confidential information they are trusted with every day makes them especially tempting targets for cyber criminals. Make sure your cybersecurity is in good hands, and minimize the risk of your operations being disrupted.
No matter how good your hardware, systems, or providers, sooner or later something may happen to your data. It could become corrupted, you could lose access temporarily or long-term, or it could fall prey to unauthorized tampering. A proper backup system will turn an absolute disaster into something you can overcome.
Follow the 3-2-1 rule for data backup:
You must also test your backups regularly. Nothing is worse than having to go to your backups and discovering that you’ve been recording junk data for the last six months.
A slow, obsolete workstation could be robbing you of time you could be using, winning new clients and closing more deals.
A new office workstation (as of Q2 2023) should have all of the following, at a minimum*:
Such a system should last you at least five years before it needs to be replaced.
*Of course, minimum specs and upgrade timing will vary based on your exact use case.
Replacing magnetic HDDs with solid-state SSDs and upgrading RAM to the 16GB range can bring new life to an old system and delay the need for replacement for approximately two years.
