Future-proofing finance: building a Proactive IT organisation for resilient operations

Building IT resilience is a non-negotiable priority for the financial sector, especially with regulations such as the DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) that require institutions to withstand, recover from, and adapt to operational disruptions while maintaining service continuity. In today’s AI-driven digital landscape, increasing cyber threats, complex IT ecosystems, and growing consumer expectations make a reactive "hope for the best" approach unsustainable.

To strengthen resilience in 2025 and beyond, financial firms must transition from reactive measures to a tiered, proactive IT resilience strategy that safeguards operations, ensures regulatory compliance, and protects customer trust. This resilience involves not only preparing for disruptions but also implementing robust systems, predictive insights, and full visibility across the IT digital estate. By understanding hardware and software needs at the endpoint level, financial institutions can assure secure, compliant operations while supporting mission-critical applications.

Operational resilience is especially vital amid challenges such as economic volatility, compliance pressures, budget constraints, and persistent threats such as IT outages or cyberattacks. To address these, IT leaders must balance operational efficiency and cost control with delivering a seamless digital employee experience (DEX). Achieving this balance requires leveraging AI, data insights, and DEX solutions to enhance both IT resilience and overall business continuity.

Adopting a Proactive IT model requires four key elements: 

Traditional approaches to IT operations (ITOps) in finance have often been reactive, with IT teams responding to incidents, such as servers down or networking issues, only after disruptions occur and support requests are submitted. This ticket-by-ticket method of resolving issues is not only tedious and time-consuming but also places a significant strain on already stretched IT budgets.

In contrast, a proactive IT model emphasises prevention, early detection, and swift resolution. By addressing issues before they affect productivity, organisations can reduce downtime, improve the end-user experience and achieve significant cost savings. This shift requires more than a change in mindset; it demands a concerted focus on four key elements:

1. Performance data from the endpoint 

Performance data from endpoints is essential for reducing costs and boosting productivity by helping organisations avoid IT problems that disrupt operations. With comprehensive visibility into device, application, and network health, businesses can proactively address root causes before issues escalate, minimising downtime and support costs while improving efficiency.

The financial impact of investing in robust digital employee experience solutions cannot be overstated. These tools can help transform IT operations from a cost centre into a strategic enabler, delivering measurable benefits such as reduced downtime expenses, optimised IT budgets, improved productivity, and increased ROI. Through data-driven decisions, organisations can achieve a rare combination of operational excellence and significant financial savings.

What sets this approach apart is its ability to provide IT teams with a complete view of their digital landscape. By capturing thousands of data points every few seconds, teams unlock a “single source of truth” that empowers decision-making across the enterprise. From IT administrators to C-level executives and HR leaders, every stakeholder benefits from the actionable insights needed to align IT performance with broader business outcomes.

2. Automated detection 

To shift from a reactive to a proactive IT model, service desk teams must actively and continuously identify emerging issues before they have an impact on users. This change requires employing AI-powered analytics and machine learning models to interpret data, spot trends, and uncover root causes. Given finite resources, prioritisation is critical - organisations need to focus on resolving the issues that have the greatest impact on users.

In our work with financial firms, we leverage 1,300+ sensors to monitor for anomalies across a digital estate. These sensors, combined with advanced analytics, enable early detection and prioritisation of problems before they disrupt productivity. By tracking sensor trends and pinpointing growing areas of concern, IT teams can initiate proactive investigations and resolve issues before they escalate.

For example, one bank detected and resolved technology issues before they impacted key personnel, reducing service desk call rates and saving approximately $300,000 per year.  

3. The ability to act fast 

Beyond identifying and prioritising issues, a proactive IT approach should enable rapid and efficient action through multiple methods, including:

• Automated Healing: Deploying fixes automatically, according to group policies.

• Self-Healing: Resolving issues before they affect users and equipping users with tools to address certain problems themselves.

• Assisted Healing: Allowing IT teams to remotely resolve issues on user systems.

• Mass Healing: Deploying patches and updates to thousands of devices simultaneously.

These strategies not only streamline the resolution process but also minimise disruptions to user productivity, while helping organisations control IT costs. By leveraging scalable tools, IT teams can address a larger volume of issues efficiently, without the need for significant team expansion.

To further enhance problem resolution, pre-built scripts tailored to specific use cases enable mass-healing of critical issues. Self-healing opportunities shift IT support “to the left,” empowering users to resolve simple problems independently, often without needing assistance from Level 1 support agents.

4. Outcome tracking 

After collecting data, detecting issues, and taking action, it’s crucial to track outcomes to refine your strategies. Regularly evaluating the effectiveness of interventions enables teams to determine whether proactive measures are improving and identify areas where strategies may need adjustment.

DEX platforms with embedded AI engines play a vital role in this process. By continuously monitoring the enterprise’s digital IT estate, they identify early warning signs of system performance issues, hardware degradation, or network bottlenecks. This visibility enables IT teams to anticipate problems, prioritise alerts, and prevent outages before they occur, saving both time and resources.

In 2025 and beyond, IT resilience in the financial sector will hinge on adopting a proactive approach that anticipates challenges, addresses vulnerabilities, and aligns IT operations with business goals. By leveraging deep data insights, automated detection, rapid action, and outcome tracking, financial institutions can meet regulatory demands such as DORA, enhance operational efficiency, and ensure seamless service continuity. Proactive IT is not just a technical upgrade—it’s a strategic imperative to safeguard operations, control costs, and deliver a secure, scalable, and user-focused digital experience. The institutions that embrace this approach today will lead the way in building trust, driving innovation, and thriving in an increasingly complex digital landscape.