The complexity of modern banking systems means that a small cloud service outage on one side of the planet can stop someone’s payment card working thousands of miles away. To prevent that, 10x has a thorough, industry leading operational risk and resilience plan. 

It just has to work

In the world of banking, resilience means someone can use their payment card at a petrol station at four o’clock in the morning and be confident that it will work. There are few services that people depend on in the same way they depend on their bank. Whether it’s paying for filling up the car or buying essential food, those services are reliable only if the underlying technology is resilient and supported by back-ups.  

In many sectors, operational risk and resilience can afford to be more reactive; if a company’s cloud database goes down, then the team works to get it working again. A short outage may not be disastrous. In banking, it’s vital to embed resilience into everything you do, so that you minimize the operational risk of a failure happening at all, says Mike Whitten, Head of Security Operations at 10x. 

In banking, it’s vital to embed resilience into everything we do.

Mike Whitten Head of Security Operations at 10x

For the complex web of technologies that support modern banking, operational risk and resilience requires a high level of expertise. “We have some really experienced people working on operational resilience here,” says Mr Whitten. “experts in addressing non-functional requirements.” 

Putting ourselves in clients’ shoes 

With over 20 years of working on delivery, operations, resilience and business continuity, Mr Whitten says “it’s key to put yourself in our clients’ shoes to anticipate their needs. It’s imperative that 10x has an operational framework for business continuity, disaster recovery, and crisis management, covering the entire business.” With so much of today’s banking systems dependent on connected services, the team’s responsibility extends to working with the supply chain to ensure the resilience of third and fourth parties. 

Embedding resilience means thinking about how the 10x platform and products are designed to offer the highest levels of availability for clients. “We aim to be resilient enough to not fail in the first place. But should the worst happen, we make sure we know what to do and how to recover with minimal impact for our clients and their customers,” says Mr Whitten. 

Sector-leading operational resilience 

Over the last 18 months, we put extra focus into building a sector-leading operational resilience program. Mr Whitten says: “In terms of understanding what we need to do, having the mechanisms in place to be able to do those things, I think we’d compare very favourably.” 

That includes regular testing and failovers to ensure systems are robust and that back-up systems kick-in when a problem arises. For example, we perform regular failovers from one cloud hosting region to another to protect ourselves against an outage, as well as testing the restoration of database backups. The availability of client systems is tested at least annually as part of our SOC2 compliance. And of course, clients have agreed service levels in their contracts, so that they know what to expect. That comes with tiered response levels in the event of an incident and the ability to escalate should a crisis event arise. 

Emergencies are, thankfully, few and far between. Our emphasis on embedding resilience in everything we do helps achieve that. The banks we work with need to be able to adapt to changing conditions and remain operational, so they don’t let their customers down who depend on them. It is vital that we provide the support they need to make that happen. 

At 10x, we have made it our mission to surpass the ordinary on cloud security, read our recent blog on our commitment to enhanced core banking system security or chat with our team today.