Financial institutions are focused on IT resilience as outages repeatedly disrupt operations such as the ones that affected Crowdstrike, Bank of America, Monzo and others this year. 

With outage repercussions in mind, organizations are investing in infrastructure, IT teams and resiliency strategies to reduce downtime and losses, software company Cockroach Labs co-founder and Chief Executive Spencer Kimball tells Bank Automation News on this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. 

In a survey conducted by Cockroach Labs and Wakefield Research, 100% of respondents said they had experienced unplanned or unexpected downtime in the past 12 months. The report surveyed 1,000 senior cloud architects and engineering and technology executives from Aug. 29 to Sept. 10.  

The report also found: 

• 53% of banking and financial service companies experience outages or service interruptions weekly or more frequently; 

• 93% of executives surveyed said they lose sleep over the impacts of unplanned downtime; and 

• Cost per outage ranges from $10,000 to $1 million.  

Listen as Kimball discusses what is causing these outages and how to build resilient infrastructure. 

Identifying disruptors

With downtime increasing, it is important for organizations to find the root of the problems and identify where the outages originated. 

According to the report, causes of downtime include: 

• Network issues; 

• Software issues; 

• Cyberattacks; 

• Cloud service provider reliability; 

• Third-party service failure; 

• Environmental factors; 

• Human error; 

• Capacity issues; and  

• Hardware failures. 

Test, test, test

To increase resiliency on platforms and reduce the likelihood of outages, financial institutions must test their resiliency, Kimball says.  

However, testing today is not where it should be, he says. The report found: 

• 62% of organizations fail to perform regular system updates. 

• 71% of organizations don’t perform failover testing. 

“Doing failover tests, making sure your systems work, at least as well as they’re designed to work, is invaluable,” Kimball says. 

Register here for early-bird pricing for Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2025, taking place March 3-4 in Nashville, Tenn. View the full event agenda here.