Systemic bank: regulator-grade cyber resilience for critical assets

Context

A systemic European bank under national and ECB supervision. Facing escalating cyber threats and regulatory pressure, the bank needed to guarantee the continuity of its most critical business activities during a severe cyber incident.

FuturWork embedded IT Security & Risk consultants full-time in the Critical Asset Recovery core team, aligned with the group-wide Cyber Resilience Program.

Challenges

• No end-to-end view of critical assets. Documentation was spread across servers, network, storage, identity and applications, with no consolidated architecture view.
• Incomplete recovery plans. Undocumented dependencies and missing sequencing exposed the bank to prolonged outages and systemic risk.
• Regulatory and audit pressure. Supervisors required auditable recovery capabilities, formal risk assessments and evidence-based maturity tracking.

What we did

• Full critical asset mapping. Every IT component was mapped to the critical business activity it supports, with architecture diagrams and dependency matrices.
• Gap analysis and risk quantification. Missing recovery plans were identified and risks documented in a format regulators can use.
• Controlled restoration sequencing. We built an executable recovery orchestration, aligned across technical domains and stakeholders.

Results

• 100% of critical assets mapped and covered
• Recovery plans documented, sequenced and auditable
• Risk exposure presented in a regulator-ready format

From fragmented recovery documentation to regulator-grade cyber resilience.

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