MANILA, Philippines, December 2, 2013 – Leading telecoms provider PLDT, through its corporate enterprise arm PLDT ALPHA Enterprise, recently announced that it has taken measures to ensure the local banking and finance industry’s requirements are met in allowing IT outsourcing with its BSP-compliant Cloud services and infrastructure.

With the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) heeding to the global trend in technology adoption for financial institutions, PLDT has issued fully compliant measures in security and privacy, continuity, and monitoring and audit, that would aid the banking industry’s implementation of IT outsourcing after the recent BSP circular was released on Information Technology Risk Management (ITRM) for all banks, and BSP-supervised institutions.

“We fully support the BSP’s move for innovation, and we look forward in not only complying with these guidelines, but also in collaborating with them as well as with industry leaders in adopting the emerging technologies that can help serve our enterprises better,” said PLDT FVP and Head of PLDT ALPHA Enterprise Jovy Hernandez.

“PLDT has heavily invested in its infrastructure and advance IT systems not only to meet implemented standards, but for local enterprises and critical industries to enjoy the benefits of global innovations.”

With security and privacy risks leading major concerns in outsourcing IT processes, the BSP has directed financial institutions “to ensure service providers are only given access to the information and systems they need in order to perform their function.”

PLDT’s IT infrastructure and systems have been modeled in accordance to the ISO 27001:2005 certification for Information Security Management for extremely sensitive data and applications through multi-layered physical and virtual security in addition to stringent role-based data access policies.

PLDT’s business continuity measure also holds strong in the BSP’s requirements in integrating a service provider’s business continuity plan (BCP) to keep financial institutions fully operational despite calamities or other incidents as IT services are housed in the country’s first purposely-built, industrial-strength data center, the PLDT VITRO Data Center.

The PLDT VITRO Data Center is the first local provider to receive an ISO 22301:2012 Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) standard certification from Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS) - the world’s leading inspection, verification, testing and certification company.

Financial institutions can also further guard against downtime through VITRO’s Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity solutions.

The BSP also requires financial institutions to properly monitor the solutions they outsource to service providers, and to be regularly audited by clients and the BSP itself.  PLDT VITRO’s remote monitoring service and PLDT Cloud’s Cloud Controller program enable financial institutions to remotely monitor system performance, where auditors may even visit PLDT’s facilities to check on policy compliance.

“It has always been our sincerest desire to see the Philippine banking and finance industry become a premier global player, and, as the country starts to implement technology adoption in critical industries, PLDT will always see to it that compliance and global standards are met and served,” said Hernandez.

Earlier this year, PLDT, through ePLDT, was the recipient of the Data Center Services Vendor of the Year from leading international research firm Frost & Sullivan, and the only Philippine Data Center member of the Uptime Institute Network.