Sectors ยท Financial Services Industry (Banking and Capital Markets)

Regulators do not accept an outage narrative.

Continuity in a bank is not a technical claim, it is an evidenced position. Klyvant designs the estate so the recovery story holds when someone senior asks to see it.

Tier-1Core platform work
RehearsedNot asserted
EvidencedBefore it is asked for

The pressure

A restore that has never been executed is an assumption.

What we are engaged to produce

A tiered recovery position where each tier has been executed, timed and documented, and where the evidence is current enough to satisfy an examiner without a scramble.

Banking estates carry the heaviest continuity obligation of any sector we work in, and the least tolerance for an explanation after the fact. The question is never whether a recovery plan exists. It is whether anyone has run it, on this estate, under production load, recently enough for the result to mean something.

What we usually find is a documented position that has drifted. Runbooks describing a platform that was replaced two refresh cycles ago. Replication configured for systems that have since been reclassified. Backup jobs succeeding against volumes nobody has restored since commissioning.

Underneath that sits the hardware problem. Legacy kit past end of support carries a compliance exposure that surfaces during examination and a downtime exposure that surfaces on a Friday evening, and the two are usually discovered in that order.

The instrument

Recovery tiers, and what proves them

Every system is assigned a tier, and every tier carries an evidence obligation. An examiner does not accept a target that has never been executed, so neither do we.

Recovery tiering, illustrativeSet per client during stage one
System classRecovery timeData lossEvidence standard
Tier 0Core Banking ledger Recovery timeMinutes Data lossZero EvidenceSynchronous replication, rehearsed failover, evidenced at each test
Tier 1Payments and channels Recovery timeUnder 1 hour Data lossUnder 5 minutes EvidenceWarm standby with documented and timed cutover
Tier 2Reporting and analytics Recovery timeSame business day Data lossUnder 4 hours EvidenceRestore from backup, tested quarterly under load
Tier 3Internal and archival Recovery timeNext business day Data lossUnder 24 hours EvidenceStandard restore, tested annually

The evidence pack we leave behind

  • Timed failover results, per tier, dated
  • Restore logs with volumes and durations
  • Dependency map signed by system owners
  • End-of-support register with remediation dates
  • Runbooks matching the tested procedure
  • Residual risk register with owners named

Applied here

Where the four disciplines land in a bank

01

Cloud and Infrastructure Modernisation

Estate moved in increments the change board will actually approve, with workload placement decided against data residency rules rather than around them.

Multi-Cloud PlacementData residencyPhased cutoverChange board alignment
02

Data Harmonisation and Backup

Recovery built on Veeam and VMware, tiered against business classification, and rehearsed on a schedule rather than when an audit is announced.

VeeamVMwareTiered RTO and RPOQuarterly rehearsal
03

Sustainable Energy Engineering

Load profiling across the data halls that carry Core Banking, so resilience decisions and power decisions stop being made by separate teams on separate budgets.

Load profilingUPS and PDU reviewCooling efficiencyCost per rack
04

Enterprise Audit and Advisory

End-of-support exposure mapped across the installed base and ranked by regulatory and operational impact, with remediation dated against the budget cycle.

EOL and EOSL registerImpact rankingRemediation planBoard reporting

A typical first engagement

Most banks start with an assessment, not a migration

Step 01

Estate and dependency inventory

Discovery across the halls and the branch network, including the systems that were never entered into the asset register.

Step 02

Recovery position review

Current tiering tested against what the business actually classifies as critical, with the gaps timed rather than described.

Step 03

Ranked remediation plan

A dated sequence, priced, where each phase leaves the recovery position defensibly better than it found it.

The recovery position is either evidenced or it is a story. Examiners can tell the difference.