Following Martin’s update last week, we continue to face significant disruption to our IT systems.
Last Tuesday morning, the team were met with blank pages when attempting to log in to our hosted cloud server.
It quickly became apparent that something was very wrong.
Over a week later, we remain without access to the systems we use to manage tasks, record information, send and receive encrypted messages, and construct financial plans.
This loss of access is very disruptive and frustrating. However, we are still here and able to deal with any urgent issues and requests.
We have to resort to a much more manual process, so please bear with us. If you were expecting something from us, please nudge us as we don’t have access to our task management system.
Our temporary loss of IT systems does not impact your ability to access your pensions, investments in any way, or indeed our access. This is a loss of systems and processes rather than a loss of data. It does not impact your investments.
Because the provider of our managed IT services looks after many businesses, it is taking longer than expected to restore our systems access. Our IT provider is working day and night to restore access, and we’re hopeful this happens imminently.
There is no evidence that any data was breached during this systems failure, although we have adopted a belt and braces approach, reporting the incident to the Information Commissioner.
Despite no evidence of any data breach during this incident, it is always a good practice to maintain a high level of vigilance and use every available security tool, including strong passwords that are frequently changed and two-factor authentication where available.
If you were expecting to hear from Informed Choice this week, send an email to your usual point of contact. Our task management system is still offline, but we hope our IT provider will restore this very soon.
If you have any questions or concerns, please speak to your Financial Planner, email hello@icfp.co.uk or call us on 01483 274566.
