The business processes of banks depend on functioning IT-Systems. Malfunctions or outages, especially in complex data centers could result in high losses right up to insolvency of individual financial institutions. As a critical infrastructure, banks are of a central importance for both national and international payments so that such an outage could ultimately compromise the contractual capability of a nation and its economy.

To safeguard such systems in the past, admission and access controls were deployed.The security of which is decreasing constantly in the times of increasing threats i.e. through targeted cyber-attacks. Therefore a systematic IT-Security and Risk-Management is increasingly important. With regulated processes for the planning, execution and evaluation of measures, the risks for the banks or rather the data centers should be reduced and the compliance with statutory obligations is to be ensured. Hitherto management-tools are to slow on account of their complexity of the networked IT-Systems and their dependencies, to provide concrete decision-making aids in acute crisis situations.

The project PREVENT (Management-Software for preventive crisis and risk management for data centers of system-relevant banks) has as goal, to develop methods and tools for a systematic security evaluation of data centers. In the project, rules of conduct and risk management are to be connected with real-time measurements, security tests and simulations of risk scenarios in order to get an as accurate as possible picture of the risk to the IT-Security and to thereby create a better safeguard of the data centers.

By adopting this approach, dependencies between processes and applications in the banking sector can be better identified as well as recording and eliminating risks. With the developed Management-Software, overviews of the situation can be created in real-time in order to initiate protective and counter measures in crisis situations.