Financial service organisations are increasingly becoming critical infrastructure in the Australian economy, meaning any disruption to services has a significant and lasting impact on the community.

The Cevo 4R (Resilience Readiness Review and Remediation) assessment provides a consistent and repeatable way to assess all aspects of a workload’s operations and provide financial service organisations confidence in delivery. Tailored specifically to the financial services industry, the assessment leverages the reliability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework in alignment with prudential standards CPS-231, CPS-232 and CPS-234.

Resiliently-architected workloads are designed to flex and react to operational events that are likely to impact availability and performance of customer services. In modern systems, much of this reaction is automated to ensure customer impacts are minimised.

With the launch of the AWS Melbourne Region, APRA-regulated entities such as banks and insurance companies have the opportunity to enhance their resiliency and ability to continue operations, and meet obligations following a loss of service and a range of other disruption scenarios, as outlined in APRA’s Information paper – outsourcing involving cloud computing services. Until now, companies have had to work within the limitations of only one AWS region in Australia. The Melbourne region presents an opportunity for customers to enhance their services running in AWS to include multi-region failover.

This assessment explores the architecture of your workload, in addition to the operational tooling and processes, with a focus on validating how the workloads are designed and implemented to achieve the required recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO). This provides a view of the resilience of existing systems and how a multi-region strategy can increase availability, resiliency and performance in AWS, in the context of Australia’s financial services market.

For more details on the principles within the AWS Well Architected Framework see Are You Well Architected? - Cevo.

Process

Cevo consultants work alongside your development and operations teams to review the current state of the workload, and build a backlog of work to implement improvements.

A Cevo Resilience Readiness Review is delivered across 2-3 weeks, and is composed of the following activities:

• Onsite or remote workshops covering:
  • Workload Well-Architected Review
  • Deep-dive resilience review, including:
    • Review of workload architecture
    • Review of disaster recovery process documentation
    • Review of operational process and team capability
    • Review of deployment and operational tooling
• Onsite or remote information sessions covering:
  • Introduction to high availability and disaster recovery concepts and scenarios
  • Review of industry standard architectures and techniques to achieve high availability and disaster recovery
  • Technology demonstrations of high availability and disaster recovery solutions (as required)
  • Review and validation of the current state of the workload’s non-functional requirements relating to recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO)

Further to the Resilience Readiness Review, Cevo also has skilled team members to assist you with the development and deployment of the items identified in the backlog.

Outputs

By the end of the engagement, you will receive: Resilience and Recovery Review report highlighting the current state of the workload Improvement backlog containing recommended remediation activities, effort sizing and sequencing Team briefing on the workload’s current state and improvement list