Backup like a startup

A modern, pragmatic approach to operational resilience

Financial institutions today face unprecedented pressure to ensure uninterrupted service. Regulatory frameworks such as the UK Operational Resilience rules and the EU’s DORA regime demand not only robust continuity planning but also a deep understanding of sprawling, interdependent IT estates. Yet compliance alone doesn’t guarantee resilience, and traditional standby systems, which are cold, dormant, and rarely tested, leave too many gaps unaddressed.

Backup like a startup explores a different path. By taking cues from the engineering practices of digital‑native challengers, you can evolve your organisation’s resilience posture, enabling you to reduce downtime, improve confidence in critical systems, and free teams to focus on what truly drives value. Throughout the guide, we share how we’ve helped clients navigate this shift, translating modern principles into practical steps that work even within complex legacy environments.

What the guide covers

At the heart of Backup like a startup is a simple but powerful model for strengthening operational resilience: Visibility, Vigilance and Value. We explore how gaining a clear, connected view of your IT estate enables you to understand the dependencies, blind spots and hidden risks that lie across complex architectures – a challenge intensified by modern regulatory expectations such as DORA and the UK Operational Resilience framework.

From there, the guide moves into the discipline of Vigilance: the continuous, proactive effort to surface weaknesses before they cause real‑world disruption. You’ll find practical insight into how automated testing, live alternates, modern observability approaches and engineering practices like Site Reliability Engineering reduce reliance on manual processes and strengthen resilience throughout the software lifecycle.

Finally, we turn to Value; not just the intrinsic value of compliance, but the broader gains that come from modernising engineering practices. As the guide shows, improvements made in the name of resilience often become enablers of agility, speed‑to‑market and more confident change. Cloud‑native approaches, automation and continuous testing free teams to focus on the work that creates meaningful impact, rather than firefighting infrastructure.

If you’re seeking a clearer, more modern blueprint for operational resilience – one grounded in real‑world experience rather than abstract theory – Backup like a startup offers practical clarity. It shows how regulatory obligations can become catalysts for engineering excellence, helping you build systems that are faster to recover, easier to evolve, and better aligned with the expectations of today’s customers.