Protecting Critical Applications: Building Resilience Into the Application Layer for Australian Financial Services

The impacts of downtime in financial services extend far beyond inconvenienced users; each instance costs thousands per minute and leads to regulatory breaches. Critical applications – such as trading platforms, customer portals, and collaboration tools – face increasing exposure to cyberthreats like ransomware, misconfigurations, and third-party failures.

The demand for resilience is evident globally: Gartner estimates that global IT spending will reach $5.43 trillion in 2025, while spending on data center systems will reach $474.9 billion — driven by the demand for AI-optimised infrastructure and business continuity solutions. Meanwhile, Deloitte projects cybercrime will cost the global economy $10.5 trillion in 2025.

Traditional infrastructure-focused resilience strategies no longer suffice. CPS 230, the Operational Risk Management mandate by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), requires operational resilience across all critical operations, including the application layer.

This blog explores how Australia’s financial institutions can build application-layer resilience through automated recovery, policy enforcement, CPS 230-aligned governance, and a unified, purpose-built platform that enables these capabilities.

Why Application-Layer Resilience Matters for Australian Financial Institutions

Daily operations in Australia’s financial institutions are evolving rapidly, shaped by AI’s role in digital transformation, cloud adoption, and heightened regulatory expectations. As core business functions increasingly rely on digital platforms, the application layer has become a focal point for operational risk.

Risks of an Unprotected Application Layer

Defined as the software environment where end-user interactions occur, this layer includes the following in Australia’s financial services industry:

Retail banking apps used for daily transactions
Online trading platforms that execute high-frequency trades
Customer service portals that handle sensitive account data and real-time support
Microsoft 365 and Teams environments used internally for regulated communications and document collaboration

These applications are embedded in workflows and daily customer experiences that are essential to trust. A misconfigured permission in a banking app, a failed integration with a third-party payment gateway, or a ransomware attack on a collaboration platform can result in service outages, data exposure, and non-compliance with APRA mandates. These scenarios highlight the critical need for strategic data security posture management (DSPM) to continuously monitor, assess, and remediate data security risks across the application ecosystem.

Comprehensive data protection strategies are also essential: not only to ensure rapid recovery from disruptions like ransomware attacks or system failures, but also to uphold business continuity, a core requirement under CPS 230. When critical application data is compromised, the ability to restore operations swiftly is fundamental to maintaining uninterrupted service and meeting regulatory expectations. To stay vigilant, financial organisations must leverage a unified, purpose-built platform that enables automated recovery.

Ensuring Business Continuity with the AvePoint Confidence Platform

Business continuity is a cornerstone of CPS 230, which requires financial organisations to maintain operations and recover swiftly from disruptions. Protecting critical applications, especially those in Microsoft 365 environments, requires more than just basic backup. Financial organisations must follow a comprehensive data protection strategy to secure these applications, ensuring rapid recovery and minimal data loss.

The AvePoint Confidence Platform supports business continuity by:

Delivering comprehensive backup solutions for Microsoft 365 and other essential platforms, safeguarding critical data across emails, Teams chats, SharePoint sites, and OneDrive files.
Enabling rapid, granular recovery so financial organisations can restore individual items or entire workspaces quickly, minimising downtime and service impact.
Supporting recovery objectives with automated backup and recovery workflows, institutions can define how quickly systems must be restored (recovery time objective or RTO) and how much data loss is acceptable (recovery point objective or RPO), ensuring compliance with regulatory expectations and internal risk thresholds.

By aligning data protection and recovery capabilities with business continuity goals, financial organisations can confidently meet CPS 230 requirements, maintain service availability, and protect both their reputation and customer trust.

Enforcing Governance to Bolster Application-Layer Resilience

Governance is vital to ensure financial applications are secure, compliant, and operationally sound. As regulatory expectations shift under CPS 230, governance must apply to the application layer where sensitive data is accessed, shared, and stored.

Identifying Governance Gaps in Financial Applications

Governance gaps emerge in platforms where collaboration meets sensitive financial data. Common risks include excessive user permissions, unclassified records, and uncontrolled external sharing — governance gaps that require robust DSPM to identify and remediate.

These gaps can lead to audit failures and service disruptions. For instance, a Teams workspace used for internal financial reporting may lack appropriate access controls. A customer portal may allow external sharing without oversight. Both scenarios pose compliance risks under APRA’s mandates.

Addressing Governance with the AvePoint Confidence Platform

The AvePoint Confidence Platform provides essential support for financial organisations to embed governance into daily operations by:

Identifying risks in Microsoft 365. Through DSPM capabilities, financial organisations gain clear visibility into where sensitive data resides, highlight over-permissioned users, and flag unclassified records, making it easier to pinpoint governance gaps that could impact compliance or resilience.
Remediating risks in Microsoft 365. DSPM enables targeted actions on identified vulnerabilities by adjusting access controls, classifying data appropriately, and restricting external sharing — all of which help maintain compliance and reduce the risk of audit failures or data breaches.
Providing data protection for critical applications. Continuous safeguards are maintained for workspaces and application data, ensuring financial organisations can recover quickly and keep business operations running in the face of accidental deletion, ransomware incidents, or other disruptions.

These capabilities support continuous compliance and strengthen operational resilience across the application layer.

Aligning Application Resilience with CPS 230

CPS 230 is a game-changing standard in Australia’s financial services industry, requiring regulated entities to pinpoint critical operations, set disruption tolerance thresholds, and embed continuity planning into daily workflows.

Understanding CPS 230’s Implications for the Application Layer

CPS 230 has significant implications for the digital tools and platforms that staff and customers rely on daily.

Many essential activities – onboarding new customers, processing trades, or preparing compliance reports – happen through applications, not just physical infrastructure or manual processes. These platforms are central to how financial organisations operate, and CPS 230 expects them to be resilient, recoverable, and well-governed.

This means institutions must be able to:

Show how key business functions depend on specific applications.
Prove that those applications can recover quickly from disruptions.
Monitor and report on how well those systems are protected and governed.

This operational dependency on applications makes comprehensive data protection not only a technical safeguard but also a regulatory necessity under CPS 230’s resilience requirements.

CPS 230 doesn’t just ask whether systems are backed up — it asks whether the organisation understands how its operations depend on those systems, and whether it can keep them running when it matters most.

Supporting CPS 230 Alignment with the AvePoint Confidence Platform

The AvePoint Confidence Platform equips financial organisations with tools to operationalise CPS 230 mandates at the application layer. It empowers them to:

Map business functions to the applications and data that support them, helping identify which platforms underpin critical operations and require resilience planning.
Automate governance and backup processes, ensuring recoverability, policy enforcement, and audit readiness across collaboration and customer-facing environments.
Deliver board-level visibility through dashboards and reporting tools that surface resilience metrics, policy adherence, and areas of risk.

These capabilities do more than support regulatory alignment — they reinforce operational oversight and reduce risk exposure across the application ecosystem, fortifying resilience where it matters most.

Moving Beyond Survival: Thriving Through Disruption

In today’s high-stakes financial environment, application-layer resilience is a regulatory and operational imperative. As Australia’s financial services industry faces evolving cyberthreats and CPS 230 mandates, the AvePoint Confidence Platform delivers what matters: automated recovery, proactive governance, and regulatory alignment in one unified approach that protects operations, customers, and reputation.

Resilience isn’t just about surviving disruption. True operational resilience is about being prepared, accountable, and confident in the face of it.