FDIC Information Technology Strategic Plan: 2017 - 2020: Letters from the Chairman, Vice-Chairman, and CIO

For more than 80 years, the FDIC has played an essential role in maintaining the stability of, and public confidence in, America's financial system. This system has become increasingly reliant on technology, with consumers relying on the convenience and immediacy of online and mobile banking services. As a result, financial institutions are deploying more technology to address and anticipate consumer demand, as well as to mitigate cybersecurity risks. The FDIC is evolving as well, with information technology (IT) playing an increasingly critical role in how we carry out our mission.

Reliable, up-to-date, and secure IT is essential to our mission. IT facilitates and streamlines our day-to-day work and allows us to collaborate seamlessly and securely, both internally and with other agencies, the financial institutions we supervise, and consumers. The 2017–20 Information Technology Strategic Plan gives us a clear path toward modernizing our IT services; phasing out legacy systems; and protecting our people, information, and systems against increasingly sophisticated threats. Most importantly, this plan ensures that our IT solutions are fully aligned with the FDIC's mission to insure deposits, supervise insured institutions, and resolve failed institutions.

Effective IT strategies are able to strike a difficult balance between agility and stability, as well as between accessibility and security. The 2017–20 Information Technology Strategic Plan achieves this balance by striving for scalable systems and operations that are both highly responsive and resilient, and recognizing that critical FDIC information must be readily accessible to the right people and safeguarded from those who would compromise our ability to preserve and promote confidence in the U.S. financial system.

As we implement the IT Strategic Plan, we are committed to improving our ability to respond to both new IT opportunities and threats; developing innovative, proactive measures to mitigate those threats; and anticipating the needs of consumers, financial institutions, and our staff. We recognize that these goals can only be accomplished through collaboration and a shared responsibility for IT service delivery across the FDIC. By achieving the goals in this plan, our IT systems—and the FDIC itself—will be stronger.

I am pleased to present the 2017–20 Information Technology Strategic Plan, which outlines deliberate steps to modernize and improve the security of the FDIC's information technology infrastructure. This plan will guide our efforts to provide scalable, efficient, cost-effective technology that enables continuous and secure access to data from any place at any time.

As responsible stewards of the FDIC budget, we can leverage technology to improve our productivity and make our operations more cost effective in the long run. We have already begun making some of these improvements. We have met federal security requirements for two-factor authentication (i.e., both a Personal Identity Verification (PIV) card and a Personal Identification Number (PIN) are required to access the network). We have begun deploying new technologies to strengthen security for an increasingly mobile workforce. Additionally, we are very close to our goal of having PIV cards issued to all eligible FDIC employees and contractors.

The IT Strategic Plan is built on three cross-cutting themes: Collaboration, Resource Optimization, and Innovation. These themes support the five primary goals of our plan: