Can Disaster Recovery and Backup Deployed As 1-Click Modular Systems

Overview

Planned or unplanned, infrastructure and application downtime can come at any time, from any direction, and in any form. The ability to keep an organization operational during a technology outage, facility destruction, loss of personnel, or loss of critical third party services is critical to preventing irreversible damage to a business. 

With the increasing global shift to e-commerce models and their reliance on 24/7 application uptime, high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) impact the financial health of organizations.

High Availability Versus Disaster Recovery

While they both increase overall availability, the notable difference is that with HA there is generally no loss of service. HA retains the service and DR retains the data, but with DR, there is usually a slight loss of service while the DR plan executes and the system restores.

  • High availability (HA) – The measure of a system’s ability to remain accessible in the event of a system component failure. Generally, HA is implemented by building in multiple levels of fault tolerance and/or load balancing capabilities into a system.

  • Disaster recovery (DR) – The process by which a system is restored to a previous acceptable state, after a natural (flooding, tornadoes, earthquakes, fires, etc.) or man-made (power failures, server failures, misconfigurations, etc.) disaster.

High Availability Options

You can achieve high availability through the use of clustering and/or load balancing of the nodes. Depending on the defined SLA, four HA options are possible with Mule:

  • Cold Standby
  • Warm Standby
  • Hot Standby – Active-Passive
  • Active-Active

Conclusion

The performance information of all managed devices can be managed
and displayed. Both real-time and historical performance and load information can be accessed and evaluated using easy to understand
graphics.


By setting threshold values all critical performance parameters can be
monitored, triggering local or remote alarms in case of exceeding. Critical components then can be identified with a few clicks helping to
take immediate action

Banking Upheaval – Leading Banks Are Going the Cloud Way

Overview

New technology can only be as good as its implementation. Digital platforms can position banks so that they are able to immediately respond to consumer needs. However, financial institutions must approach this ‘digital reprogramming’ in a manner that is consciously designed to proactively exploit technology to its full potential. 

Developing and designing scalable digital platforms for innovation is no mean feat, and a successful shift to highly flexible infrastructure demands a team that understands the power of available technology.

What is Self-disruption in the Banking?

According to Catherine Zhou, HSBC’s global head of ventures, digital innovation and partnerships, self-disruption is about reinventing part of your existing business. Sometimes this is done incrementally by improving existing processes, sometimes this is through radically challenging the status quo and doing things completely differently.

HSBC started with the concept that the bank could make peer-to-peer payments better for customers in Hong Kong, challenging existing banking payment models. Zhou explains: “In house, while maintaining our existing digital payments channels, we built a new social payments app called PayMe which is faster and more engaging. It now has the largest market share, with more than 2.5 million users, and we have expanded it to merchants through PayMe for Business.”

The Dearth In Creative Talent

As is natural in highly regulated industries like banking, there are limits as to how far concepts such as self-disruption can be pushed.

Bright believes that there is a balance that must be struck, and while not all areas warrant disruption, this balance can be found through a system of controls and regulation with innovation – “This is real state of the art innovation in action.”

“When it comes to highly-regulated environments, it is better to ask permission beforehand than beg forgiveness afterwards. We therefore work closely and collaboratively with official institutions, including central banks and regulators, when exploring potentially disruptive innovations,” states Bright.

Conclusion

Zhou concurs, noting that cloud offers financial services institutions the ability to architect for resilience in a way that is not possible for on-premises technology. For example, the ability to use cutting-edge data science and machine learning, delivering improved functionality, and increased automation.

What’s more, Newcomer argues, is that it is possible to achieve a stronger security posture in the cloud than on-premises. One reason for this is that when migrating to the cloud banks ensure that every control mechanism is meticulously put in place.