DTCC has outlined enhanced resilience measures that financial firms should consider adopting to ensure the continued safety of the financial markets amid what it describes as an “increasingly complex technology landscape”.
In a new white paper, The Power of Technology Resilience: A Framework for the Industry, DTCC details four resilience principles that it says should be considered during the development of all software, services, and components.
The first principle is outlined as “plan”, meaning firms should define the criteria to help support the delivery of resilient solutions in a repeatable and standardised manner.
The second of DTCC’s principles is “build” — DTCC recommends firms should employ common architectural patterns that can be leveraged by all teams to help deliver repeatable, resilient solutions. In the paper, DTCC highlights that firms should also conduct failure mode analysis to investigate the technical design of an application, and to identify any failure points in the system.
The third principle DTCC outlines is “test” to which DTCC recommends a robust testing framework that leverages automation to confirm applications are consistently tested against resilience principles.
The fourth and final principle DTCC describes as “operate”. DTCC says firms should consider enhancing their operational processes, which might include adopting dynamic alerting and monitoring practices that empower their engineers to rapidly respond to environmental failures by shifting workloads to an alternate data centre.
Firms should reimagine traditional, monolithic resilience exercises and adopt a model that enables a more continuous state of readiness for disaster events, DTCC adds.
As described in the paper, firms should also design their applications to both detect and recover from possible failures, using automation where possible. Applications should be designed to operate independently of each other, to help isolate and contain any potential failures.
Commenting on the principles, Neelesh Prabhu, managing director of architecture and enterprise services in information technology at DTCC, says: “When it comes to any firm’s resilience journey, it is important to remember that you do not have to go it alone. Industry collaboration is a key enabler of continued progress in this area. In support of this, we remain committed to sharing our experiences and best practices to help firms collectively safeguard the entire financial services industry.”
Lynn Bishop, managing director and chief information officer at DTCC, says: “There is no one-and-done approach to resilience. We believe we have laid the foundation for a solid and robust framework for ensuring technology resilience, but we intend to continue working with our clients and stakeholders to refine our approach and continue evolving.”
The publishing of the principles comes after DTCC launched an analytics solution, ITP Data Analytics aimed at post-trade data services.
The ITP Data Analytics service delivers a view of performance by providing different report types, customisable filters for data, and opportunities to compare performance against peers and counterparties.
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