Hedge IT Blog

Next week, our Global Support Group director, Dan Kummer, will be attending the Help Desk Institute’s 2012 Conference & Expo in sunny Orlando, Florida, where he will hear from some of the industry’s top experts and learn about new support desk technologies and trends.

As we look forward to this great event, we got to thinking about our own help desk team and support teams in general. What makes one help desk better than another? What are the key ingredients in providing the best possible IT support to clients?

Here are our thoughts.

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Here at Eze Castle, we believe knowledge is power.

Having an understanding of your firm’s technology needs will take you far, particularly when it comes to satisfying increasingly technology-savvy investors. But gaining that knowledge can sometimes be a challenge for fund employees who are pressed for time and busy focusing on strategic goals.

We’ve made it our mission to be a constant source of information for our hedge fund clients and partners - our Hedge IT blog is a prime example! In addition to our wealth of blog posts, we have a dedicated Knowledge Center devoted entirely to helping educate investment professionals on what’s new and exciting in hedge fund technology. Below are a few of our most popular knowledge centers, easily configured by category to help you find exactly the information you’re looking for.

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2012 is a big year for the UK, starting with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, The London Festival, World Pride, and the Olympics. There are many advantages to hosting major events including a considerable boost to the economy, urban regeneration and increased tourism. However, there are also many logistical and technological challenges the hedge fund and alternative investment industry must plan for to ensure their businesses doesn't experience disruptions.

The number of people for the Olympic Games is expected to rise by 300,000 with the number using public transport increasing by over 80,000. Transport networks will be stretched as hundreds of thousands of people use public transport, which means staff may not be able to get to work as easily as usual.

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The countdown is on as the March 30, 2012 deadline for hedge fund and private equity managers to file their registration forms with the SEC, under the Dodd-Frank Act, is just around the corner. In reality though, most firms filed their Form ADV back in February to satisfy the 45-day review period.

However, the Dodd-Frank Act continues to spark change and much debate throughout the financial services industry. Just today the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) “completed Dodd-Frank Act rules requiring swaps brokers to decide within minutes whether to clear a trade in an effort to reduce risk in the $708 trillion global swaps market,” according to Bloomberg news.

Dodd-Frank also requires that swap entities establish and maintain written business continuity and disaster recovery plans designed to enable them to resume operations with minimal disturbance to counterparties and to recover all required documentation and data.

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Earlier this week – Tuesday, March 13 to be exact – sections of Boston lost power because of an electrical transformer fire that occurred behind the Back Bay Hilton Hotel. Approximately 21,000 people were without power Tuesday night and as of late Wednesday afternoon about 4,000 people were still without power including hundreds of Boston companies.

Companies whose power came back Wednesday morning experienced minor inconveniences, such as having employees who worked late Tuesday night have to travel down 46 flights of stairs since the elevators weren’t working. Other companies who were without power all day Wednesday weren’t so lucky. As of 3:00 p.m. today (Thursday) power is still out at Boston’s Prudential Center.

This unfortunate incident is precisely why disaster recovery and business continuity planning are so important. So important in fact that we are going to re-run an oldie but goodie from our interview last year with Lisa Smith, a Certified Business Continuity Planner at Eze Castle Integration.

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In the fast-paced, volatile world of financial services, constantly maintaining normal business operations is crucial – even in the event of an unexpected disaster. Even just a few moments of downtime could be extremely costly, so it is essential that firms implement sound business continuity procedures.

Since we frequently work with our alternative investment clients on developing comprehensive business continuity plans (BCPs), we feel it is important to review and test our own BCP procedures on a regular basis to ensure they will meet our most current business needs in the event of a disaster. To this end, Lisa Smith - one of our certified business continuity professionals - and her team recently conducted a BCP table top exercise with our management team here at Eze Castle. After this successful meeting, we thought it would be valuable to share some insights on the BCP table top exercise process with our readers to spotlight the importance of this activity.

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Understanding the lingo of disaster recovery and business continuity planning is essential to ensuring a firm is fully knowledgeable during the planning process and prepared should an incident occur. Here at Eze Castle Integration we are regularly defining key DR terms for our hedge fund clients. Since we fancy ourselves experts on all things hedge fund DR related, we have have developed this handy list of common DR definitions.

Application Recovery
A component of Disaster Recovery that deals with the restoration of business system software and data, after the operating system environment has been restored or replaced.

Business Continuity
A system of planning for, recovering and maintaining both the IT and business environments within an organization regardless of the type of interruption. In addition to the IT infrastructure, it covers people, facilities, workplaces, equipment, business processes, and more.

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Over the years, the Eze Castle Disaster Recovery team has observed some common misconceptions that clients have regarding disaster recovery. Some of the major areas where we see confusion include disaster recovery system testing, documentation review, communication procedures and the importance of business continuity plans.

Our goal is always to help educate our clients so that they can improve their internal processes and be better prepared for disasters. So, to that end, I’d like to take this opportunity to clear up a few of the most common DR misconceptions to ensure that your fund is fully prepared to maintain normal business operations in the event of an outage.

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Operational due diligence has become a hot topic that continues to gain importance and attention throughout the alternative investment industry. Over the past few years, as regulations have changed and investors increasingly seek transparency, funds are spending more time than ever preparing for the due diligence process.

It is no surprise that the investment industry landscape is becoming more and more competitive. As this trend continues, investors are raising their expectations and looking towards funds that display the highest levels in operational excellence. One important way to ensure your firm meets these high standards is to complete a due diligence questionnaire (DDQ) that can be shared with potential investors.

A comprehensive DDQ covers a wide range of topics, from assets under management to audited financial statements and investment strategies. One major area of focus is the fund’s IT and accompanying security policies and procedures. At Eze Castle, we frequently assist our hedge fund clients in completing DDQ questions on technology, and we often see the same types of questions popping up. So, to help you get started, we have compiled the following list of some frequently asked DDQ questions.

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I had the pleasure of joining my colleague, Vinod Paul (managing director here at Eze Castle Integration), on a panel yesterday about disaster recovery at HFBOA’s Optimizing Hedge Fund Business Operations Conference in New York.

Titled ‘Disaster Recovery: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,’ we covered a range of topics with the overarching theme being that there is no excuse for a hedge fund not to have disaster recovery in place. To quote one panelist, “Nobody Gets a Pass” – including service providers.

Here are some of the highlights from the panel.

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