Case Study
Test IT Infrastructure to Ensure Compliance with Regulatory Requirements
Risk Technology
Client
Fortune 50 Financial Institution
Services
Business Resiliency, Regulatory Compliance, Program Management, End-to-End Testing, Change Management
Project Overview
Impacted by a new external regulatory requirement, the Client had one year to conduct a failover of mission critical applications to an alternate back-up site, reboot these applications back to their primary location, and confirm minimal-to-no-impact on day-to-day operations. Reference Point deployed a team of experts who worked with the client to help craft the test plan, enhance foundational technology infrastructure and resiliency capabilities, and deploy an agile execution model to meet the regulatory requirement.
- The Client’s main and back-up data centers were located in close proximity to one another, resulting in increased exposure to geographic risk.
- The deadline to meet a new regulatory requirement was quickly approaching; not meeting this deadline would result in significant economic and reputational risk for the enterprise.
- The Client required regulatory compliance expertise and extensive failover testing experience to build and implement the necessary standards, testing criteria, and firm-wide controls to ensure efficient and effective testing protocol as well as necessary traceability to meet the regulatory requirement.
Solution
- Reference Point deployed a team led by the former Head of Compliance & Regulatory Relations for Australian New Zealand Bank Group to map current state operations, identify operational risks, determine root cause drivers, and develop a plan to mitigate.
- The team built and implemented standardized test criteria, objectives, and controls, providing the Client with the capabilities to repeat failover testing across other critical processes.
- The team also validated test cases and results not only supported a successful failover but also met external regulator requirements – and that identified gaps were swiftly remediated.
- Additionally, the Reference Point team established divisional change management processes for the business and the business technology office to promote clear traceability and transparency of change through time.
Impact
- As an outcome of this project, the Client identified several additional projects to leverage the failover testing criteria and agile remediation approach across the enterprise.
- The Client continues to experience efficiency gains from using Reference Point’s defined best practices and lessons learned to not identify operational risks but also effectively manage and mitigate these risks.
- By implementing standard artifacts, frameworks, and policies, Reference Point enabled the Client to decrease the review timeline of testing related issues going forward.
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