For the past four decades, DTCC, in partnership with the financial services industry, has navigated through extreme events, evolving business continuity planning needs and data center redundancy expectations, and increased transaction processing capacity requirements for critical products and services.
Our new paper, The Power of Technology Resilience: A Framework for the Industry explains how we have actioned the concept of “resilience first” into our technology principles and design concepts that embed resilience into the foundation of our applications and platforms.
Operating Through Adversity
We’ve led the financial services industry through disasters and market disruption events, remaining operational during some of the most difficult periods of U.S. history. A brief look at events from the 21st century:
- 2001 Terrorist Attacks: Numerous brokers were faced with the fallout of hosting both their primary and back-up data centers in the World Trade Center in the wake of 9/11.
- 2003 Northeast Blackout: Many firms burned through fuel reserves for their data centers before power was restored during the widespread power outage.
- 2008 Credit Crisis: Increased risks throughout the market, including the Lehman Brothers collapse, massively changed volume profiles.
- 2012 Technology Glitch & Superstorm Sandy: A technical glitch at Knight Capital created a significant trading disruption and Superstorm Sandy shut down entire buildings in lower Manhattan for months.
- 2021 Market Volatility: Most recently, DTCC navigated the industry through significant market volatility in January 2021, processing just under half a billion transactions in a single day.
“Resilience First” Mindset
Our position as a critical infrastructure and service provider for the global capital markets results in a heightened focus on risk management and mitigation. In our 2019 white paper, Resilience First, we describe the principles we use to prepare for and practice our response to all types of scenarios, including pandemics.
Resilience is built into everything we do, so that we can endure, continue to execute seamlessly, and provide access to critical business services.
Our Approach for Delivering Resilience
We have developed a standard set of repeatable practices and capabilities for Agile squads and project teams to leverage, organized across a multiphase application delivery lifecycle of Plan, Build, Test, and Operate. The paper provides more details on capability objectives and the key outputs from each phase, including:
- Plan: Technology Resilience Principles, Non-Functional Requirements, and User Control Stories
- Build: Architectural Patterns and Failure Mode Analysis
- Test: Chaos Engineering and Technology Resilience Testing
- Operate: Alerting & Monitoring, Operational Runbooks, and Resilience Exercises
Prepare for Tomorrow, Today
As the industry’s landscape evolves and becomes increasingly complex, we remain focused on preparing for disruptions and failures, moving beyond the long-held notion that resilience is primarily a back-office IT concern.
Improving technology resilience is a journey that requires collaboration with clients and partners to calibrate and refine our approach. It is our intent for this white paper to create valuable discussion and dialogue on this important topic to ensure the continued safety and soundness of financial industry markets in the face of ever-evolving risks.