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IT-Lifeline and Washington Bankers Association Respond to FFIEC IT Examination Handbook Revisions

(July 29, 2008)-- IT-Lifeline has teamed with the ashington Bankers Association (WBA) to plan a series of educational webinars in response to new federal guideWlines that recommend tighter restrictions on top executives of financial institutions for overseeing business-continuity planning procedures.The federal organization that oversees business continuity planning (BCP) by financial institutions issued revisions in March to the handbook that instructs financial institutions on IT examination issues.

Jim Pishue, WBA president, said the new guidelines "make business continuity planning a critical element that should be carefully re-evaluated by all financial institutions."

"The changes are extremely important for those organizations where BCP planning is outsourced and effectively done for them by a third party provider," said Steve Tabacek, IT-Lifeline CEO.

"The Handbook also requires there to be an enterprise-wide business continuity testing policy that should establish a cycle that increases in scope and complexity over time," Tabacek added. "That will essentially broaden the in-house knowledge and skill needed for disaster recovery and business continuity testing."

Based in Spokane, IT-Lifeline is the Northwest's largest Business Continuity solutions company. IT-Lifeline provides a full range of IT continuity solutions designed to ensure that businesses can fully recover from
natural disaster, system failure, unlawful or accidental intrusion, and human error.

IT-Lifeline operates a business technology recovery hub that delivers levels of redundancy from real-time continuation of all, or priority, business operations, to recover critical data and applications.

IT-Lifeline and the WBA will be holding webinars Tuesday September 2nd and Thursday September 11th. "One of the webinars will focus on the impact to executives and the second will deal with the impact to the IT staff within the institution," Pishue said. Details for the webinars can be found at http://www.itlifeline.net.

Since 9-11, hurricane's Rita and Katrina, and other significant events -- business continuity and recovery have become paramount in the eyes of the Federal Regulators as evident by added importance to Sarbanes Oxley,
GLBA, FFIEC, which now puts the burden for compliance squarely on the shoulders of C-level executives.

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