Sponsored Content Presented by Nexcess
Somewhere in your bank, a report lands each morning confirming that last night’s backup completed. That report answers one question: Is our data safe? The question your next examiner will ask is a different one: if your systems went down right now, how long until customers could bank with you again, and can you prove it?
Plenty of institutions have a strong answer to the first question and a shaky answer to the second.
The difference between saved data and a working bank
A backup is a promise that your records exist somewhere else. Recovery is a promise that mobile banking and wire transfers come back within a window you’ve defined, tested, and put in front of the board.
Keeping backups without a tested recovery plan is like keeping an excellent insurance policy in a fireproof safe with no evacuation plan. The policy pays out after the fire, but it doesn’t get anyone out of the building.
Where untested plans fall apart
Ransomware changed the math. Restoring encrypted data into an infected network restarts the attack, so you need somewhere isolated to verify a clean restore before anything touches production, and a backup log can’t demonstrate that.
Nothing runs alone anymore, either. A single wire transfer crosses a core processor, a cloud environment, and a stack of integrations. Restoring the database doesn’t restore the routing and certificates that let those pieces talk to each other, and that’s the part nobody discovers until the restore is running.
And at a lot of community banks, the recovery plan lives in the head of one engineer. If the outage hits on a Saturday night, your RTO is however long it takes him to answer his phone, and examiners will write that up as a single point of failure.
Eight questions before your next exam
Run these with your risk committee:
- Do we have board-approved recovery timeframes for every customer-facing system?
- Have we tested those timeframes in an isolated environment in the last twelve months?
- Are recovery roles assigned to positions, with a call list someone keeps current?
- Does our documentation cover rebuilding the full environment, including network configs and certificates?
- Do we have a ransomware-specific runbook that verifies restores in a clean room first?
- Has the board seen tested recovery times, as opposed to planned ones?
- Do we know how we’d communicate with customers and examiners mid-outage?
- Is any of this automated, or does it all depend on one person being reachable?
Two or more answers of “no” or “not sure” means the strategy is backup, not recovery.
Closing the gap
This doesn’t take a budget overhaul. Tier your systems by business impact, since the mobile app might need a two-hour window while an internal reporting tool can wait a day. Write the recovery steps down and automate what you can, so rebuilding servers and reconnecting networks doesn’t hinge on memory. Then test on a schedule, in an isolated environment, instead of once a year when audit season forces it. Every test either proves the plan or finds the gap while it’s still cheap to fix.
Where Nexcess fits
At Nexcess, we run managed cloud environments for institutions that need recovery they can prove to a board and an examiner. That includes isolated environments for clean-room restore testing and ransomware verification, high availability for customer-facing portals, and support staffed around the clock, every day of the year. Talk to us for a free assessment, and we’ll map the gaps against what examiners expect and leave you with a tested recovery plan instead of a hopeful one.
Author: Michael Ohayon
Title: GM Nexcess Managed Cloud
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-a-ohayon/
Bio: Michael Ohayon is a technology executive with 15+ years of experience scaling organizations from founder-led roots to mid-market enterprises in regulated industries. Known for operational discipline, he aligns mission-critical infrastructure with complex risk management and compliance frameworks. His background spans cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, data resilience, and M&A integration, guiding teams to optimize efficiency, compliance, and secure customer outcomes.
