About Sheltered Harbor
Sheltered Harbor protects public confidence in the U.S. financial system if a devastating event like a cyberattack causes an institution's critical systems - including backups - to fail.
The Sheltered Harbor solution is for U.S. financial institutions of all types and sizes and is your lifeline to survival in an extreme cyber, data corruption or data deletion event. It ensures you to remain connected with your customers and can continue to serve them with essential services, within hours of a catastrophic event that has caused all your critical systems - including backups - to fail. Sheltered Harbor Specifications provide that "fail-safe", thereby enhancing your institutions' resilience, reputation, and customers' trust .
The following are the three core elements of the Sheltered Harbor solution:
Data Vaulting
Resilience Planning
Certification
Institutions back up critical customer account data each night in the Sheltered Harbor standard format, either managing their own vault or using their service provider. The data vault is encrypted, unchangeable, and completely separated from the institution's infrastructure.
Institutions prepare the business and technical processes and key decision arrangements to be activated in the case of a Sheltered Harbor event; where all other options to restore critical systems - including backups - have failed. Sheltered Harbor resilience plan enables the participating financial institution to quickly recover the critical account data from the vault and restore two critical services: customer access to account balance information, and access to funds against those balances.
Participating institutions adopt a robust set of Sheltered Harbor prescribed safeguards and controls, which are independently audited for compliance with the Sheltered Harbor standards. Upon successfully completing the requirements for Data Vaulting, the institution will be awarded Sheltered Harbor Data Protected certification and an accompanying seal, communicating that their customer account data is protected. Additional certification is awarded to organizations that demonstrate completed and tested resilience plans.