Financial Services Find New Use for Traditional Technology
By Dave Bermingham, Senior Technical Evangelist, SIOS Technology.Â
The financial services industry operates under constant demand for application uptime. Trading platforms, transaction processing systems, clearinghouses, ATM networks, and mobile banking applications must function without interruption. Customers expect speed and reliability, and with trillions of dollars flowing through global financial networks daily, downtime is not an option. Each minute of outage can result in lost revenue, diminished customer confidence, regulatory exposure, and reputational damage that may take years to repair.
Maintaining this level of availability is challenging under the best circumstances, and cybersecurity pressures compound the difficulty. Cybercriminals are increasingly sophisticated, opportunistic, and motivated. The threat landscape is evolving rapidly, with the time from vulnerability discovery to exploit shrinking from weeks to days and now to hours. Zero-day vulnerabilities are often weaponized almost immediately after discovery, and financial data remains among the most valuable targets for attackers.
Timely patching and updating of applications is therefore a critical security practice. Yet, financial institutions face a paradox: delaying updates increases exposure to cyber threats, while applying patches typically requires planned downtime, temporarily taking critical systems offline. Fortunately, high availability (HA) clustering—a technology long used to protect critical applications from downtime and disasters—is now being leveraged in a new way: to allow financial IT teams to patch rapidly, test safely, and maintain continuous operations.
The Cost of Delayed Patching
Financial institutions are among the most targeted organizations worldwide. While few industries are immune to the threat of cybercrimes, financial services firms are at heightened risk, unlike other sectors, they face direct financial loss, regulatory consequences, and potential global economic impacts. Cybercriminals know that these organizations manage sensitive data, high-value assets, and systems that must operate continuously. A 2023 Ponemon Institute study found that 57% of breaches were linked to unpatched vulnerabilities, most of which had been known for more than 30 days—a lifetime in the finance industry.
The International Monetary Fund has underscored the severity of the risk, stating that the financial sector is uniquely exposed to cyber threats. Historical examples, such as the Log4j vulnerability and the MOVEit Transfer breach, illustrate the speed and scale of these attacks. Organizations without rapid patching capabilities remained vulnerable for weeks, and the consequences extended beyond immediate financial loss. Banks, insurers, and trading firms risk regulatory penalties under frameworks such as PCI DSS, SOX, GDPR, SEC cybersecurity rules, and the European Banking Authority’s Operational Resilience Guidelines.
In fact the frequency and severity of this risk is so great that the FBI created the IC3 Recovery Asset Team to streamline communications between financial institutions and FBI field offices to assist victims of cybercrimes. The 2024 FBI Internet Crime Report rates financial services companies among the hardest hit by both ransomware and data breaches.
SOX and GDPR require strict control over system integrity and data protection, PCI DSS 4.0 mandates the timely application of critical patches, the SEC requires reporting of material cybersecurity incidents within four business days, and the EBA expects institutions to demonstrate operational resilience and rapid recovery. Beyond regulatory scrutiny, a breach can trigger class-action lawsuits, board-level investigations, and long-term erosion of customer trust. Yet traditional patch management typically relies on scheduled maintenance windows, which may occur days or even weeks apart, prolonging exposure to vulnerabilities.
Challenges in Traditional Patch Management
Financial IT teams face significant constraints. Critical systems are designed for continuous operation, so maintenance windows are limited and infrequent. Quality testing environments are often expensive, limited in capacity, and rarely an exact replica of production systems. Even when testing is feasible, unforeseen issues can emerge only under real-world workloads.
To mitigate the impact of downtime, organizations often schedule updates after hours or on weekends, adding operational cost and stretching already thin IT resources. Downtime, whether planned or unplanned, carries substantial financial consequences; research shows that large enterprises can incur losses of up to $9,000 per minute, with the impact even more pronounced in trading environments. These factors create a dangerous gap: security teams demand speed, while operations teams require stability. Traditional patching meets neither need, resulting in slow updates, prolonged exposure, and increased operational risk.
High Availability Clustering: Resolving the Patching Paradox
High availability clustering eliminates the trade-off between security and uptime. In a typical HA cluster, two or more servers operate as a pair. Applications run on the primary server which is clustered with a secondary server using HA clustering software. The HA software communicates with all cluster servers and monitors the health of application operation. If the software detects a failure, it automatically transfers application operation to the secondary server, often in seconds. IT teams can also manually switch operations as needed. These clustered servers can be configured such that the servers share storage, typically using a SAN or with local storage that is kept synchronized with efficient replication.
To use clusters for patch management, IT teams apply the patch to the secondary node first, then move the workload to that node to test and validate the update. If any issues appear, the administrator can quickly switch the workload back to the unpatched node so the application continues to run without interruption. Advanced clustering software streamlines this fallback process, giving administrators time to troubleshoot without affecting availability. This approach works the same on premises, in the cloud, and in hybrid cloud environments.
Once the patch is confirmed to be stable, teams complete the rolling update by applying the patch to the primary node and, if desired, switching operations back to that node. Throughout this process, the application remains available for customers and internal users. A technique that was originally designed to protect against software failures, hardware failures, and disasters now plays a key role in maintaining uptime during patch management as well.
Choose the right HA software
In today’s enterprise IT environment, not all high availability clustering solutions are created equal. While many products promise uptime, the reality is that their capabilities can vary widely, and selecting the right solution is critical for complex, mission-critical applications in the financial services industry. IT professionals should prioritize solutions that are application-aware—those that include modules specifically designed to understand and manage the unique requirements of the applications being protected. This ensures that failover processes follow vendor-recommended best practices, avoiding misconfigurations or disruptions that can arise from generic, one-size-fits-all clustering approaches.
It is equally important that IT chooses a clustering solution that is capable of monitoring the entire application infrastructure, not just the status of the server. Applications sit at the top of the infrastructure staff. All of the elements below it need to be compatible, operational, and accessible for the application to run. Therefore, high availability is about more than just detecting whether a machine is running; it requires comprehensive monitoring of the network, storage, operating system, application, database, and hardware components. By continuously observing each layer of the application stack, advanced HA solutions can detect subtle failures or performance degradations before they escalate into outages.
IT who are considering HA clustering software as a solution to their patch and upgrade management challenges should also consider clustering software that supports all of the operating systems they are using with a consistent interface. Many IT teams are running applications in Windows and more than one Linux distribution. It is important that they choose a clustering solution that can support many different operating systems and does not require specialized training for each.
For IT leaders managing critical systems, these clustering software capabilities translate into more reliable failover, faster recovery times, and a significantly reduced risk of operational disruption. Investing in an HA clustering solution that is both application-aware and infrastructure-conscious ensures that the organization can maintain continuous operations, adhere to vendor best practices, and protect the integrity of the applications that drive the business. In short, HA clustering becomes not just a tool for uptime but a strategic enabler of operational resilience.
Finally, IT teams should look for clustering software designed for ease of use. While some clustering solutions offer robust protection, they may also require significant manual scripting. Unlike solutions offered by OS vendors, purpose-built clustering solutions automate a wide range of configuration steps and can even validate inputs during configuration to minimize opportunity for human error.
Testing and Validation in Production
Traditional testing environments cannot fully replicate the complexity of production systems. HA clustering allows IT teams to test updates on the passive node within the production environment, eliminating risk to end users. Unexpected behavior can be identified and resolved immediately, transforming patching from a high-risk, disruptive task into a predictable, controlled operation.
This capability enables organizations to patch during normal business hours while maintaining strict uptime for trading platforms, payment systems, and customer-facing applications. Patching becomes routine and low risk, reducing both operational stress and exposure to cybersecurity threats.
Maintaining an Always-Current Security Posture
HA clustering supports a continuous, validated, and resilient security posture. With clusters, updates can be applied as soon as they are available, validated in production-like conditions, and protected against failures, human errors, or system disruptions. By reducing exposure from weeks to hours, HA clustering shifts patch management from a reactive defensive task to a proactive strategy for operational resilience.
For years, financial institutions treated patching as a complex, disruptive project requiring extensive planning, staffing, and carefully scheduled maintenance windows. In today’s high-velocity threat environment, that model is obsolete. Zero-day vulnerabilities appear unpredictably, and cybercriminals exploit gaps without regard for operational schedules. Organizations that rely on traditional patching accept unnecessary risk, exposing critical systems to cascading threats.
HA Clustering as a Strategic Advantage
High availability clustering transforms patch management into a continuous, automated process. IT teams can patch continuously, test confidently in production-like conditions, and maintain uninterrupted uptime. Institutions adopting HA clustering achieve faster responses to security threats, continuous validation of updates, reduced operational risk, stronger compliance alignment, and reinforced customer trust. For organizations with complex, mission-critical infrastructures, HA clustering is no longer merely a redundancy mechanism—it is foundational to modern cyber resilience and strategic IT operations.
In an industry where even brief downtime can erode customer confidence and a single breach can trigger regulatory scrutiny, HA clustering provides a decisive strategic advantage: resilience without interruption. What was once deployed solely to maintain uptime now defines a critical component of cybersecurity strategy. For decades, banks and trading firms have relied on clustering to prevent outages; today, that same technology is redefining how financial institutions secure and update their most critical applications in real time.
About the Author
Dave Bermingham is the Senior Technical Evangelist at SIOS Technology. He is recognized within the technology community as a high availability expert and has been honored by his peers by being elected to be a Microsoft MVP in Clustering six times and seven times as a Cloud and Datacenter MVP. Dave is a frequent speaker at technical conferences, including SQL Saturdays, Pass Summit, and MSSQL Tips, and is the author of Clustering for Mere Mortals blog. Dave holds numerous technical certifications and has more than thirty years of IT experience, including in finance, healthcare, and education.
