OpRes Alpha Release Announcement - Wednesday October 6th 2021
Introduction:
Today marks the release of OpRes Alpha to market. And what’s more, we are giving it away for free!
I am a firm believer that in today’s digital-driven society, if you aren’t delivering business value in ~4-months, then you should probably stop doing it. In just over 17-weeks, we have gone from identification of an industry problem, designed the scope of a minimum viable product, developed and tested our initial release, and launched a product that we believe answers the operational resilience policies set by regulators like the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulatory Authority.
You can sign-up for an Alpha account here.
But let’s tell you a little bit more about OpRes Alpha first….
What is part of the Alpha release?
As part of our launch release firms will be able:
1. Identify and document their important business services and map these to the systems, suppliers, hosting providers, and facilities that underpin them.
2. Set impact tolerances, as well as the firm’s risk appetite, for deviating outside of acceptable services levels for their important business services.
3. Document extreme yet plausible disruption scenarios against these important business services.
4. Visualise, track and report on a set of key resilience indicators captured in OpRes, through the use of dynamic dashboards and workflow automation tooling.
5. Measure concentration risks with 3rd party suppliers and identify workload distribution across public cloud providers.
Why did we build OpRes and who can use it?
OpRes has been designed and developed with a series of founding design partners, who have provided industry insights and perspectives regarding the products roadmap and which features would be most useful to support their initial responses to regulators in March 2022. In addition, advocacy sessions and perspectives interviews have also been conducted with C-Level executives across the financial services industry which have further enforced the evolution of our product, whilst also providing us with a solid backlog of user requirements that we are committed to delivering over the next quarter.
The new rules and guidance relating to Operational resilience are far-reaching. With banks, building societies, insurance firms, designated investment firms, e-money, and payment services firms. OpRes has paid close attention to the regulatory policies set by the FCA & PRA. Whilst further consideration and input has been taken from policies and guidance published by the European Banking Authority (EBA), The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), The U.S. Federal Reserve, The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) amongst others. This enables firms to comply with cross-border operational resilience policies and align with the different drivers set by regulators across the globe.
With just under 6-months to go until the first milestone set by the FCA & PRA, many firms have already started to map their important business services. However, our analysis of the market tells us that this is broadly being performed in spreadsheets, word documents, flow diagrams, and offline presentations. Whilst this is a structured process, with OpRes we have created a dynamic reporting framework that can map, identify, visualise and report on operational resilience gaps through multiple lenses.
We have decided to make our Alpha product available to banks, building societies, and insurance firms. With further firms types being made available in the coming months. By applying an if this, then that architecture, firms can create their OpRes data model in a matter of minutes using our account creation wizard and commence the mapping of their important business services even faster.
Why are we giving OpRes away for free?
As OpRes is still in Alpha, we wanted to use the provisional launch of our product to further enrich the quality of our landscape release. Furthermore, new features and functionallity will continue to be released at a steady rate over the coming weeks and months. At present, we host OpRes in a multi-tenanted environment on the public cloud. This allows us to keep cost overheads low, whilst providing firms with a sandpit to use the product, understand its suitability for their use case and then work with the OpRes team in order to calve a consumption model that is fit for their needs. In short, we can deploy OpRes in the following formats:
Dedicated public cloud-managed software as a service.
Multi-tenanted public cloud-managed software as a service.
Private cloud infrastructure across a wide array of virtual machine and container-based platforms.
Firms can request a bespoke deployment of OpRes across any of the hosting options listed above, with a dedicated development and project delivery team to support their ongoing operational resilience reporting requirements.
Should firms wish to discuss any of the commercial models referenced above then they can submit an inquiry via our website, or contact the OpRes team via email at hq@opres.uk
What is next for OpRes?
Yes, there will be bugs in the application. So please bear with us as we look to deliver new features and optimise the functionality of the application by fixing defects. Nothing is ever perfect! Though we have applied a product lead approach to our proposition and aimed to release an initial offering to market, that aims to answer the exam questions set by regulators.
When we set about launching our Alpha MVP, we had a very big scope! As such, we will be delivering further features in the coming months, that will allow firms to conduct scenario testing simulations of their important business services and suppliers, track and manage third party supplier compliance artifacts as well as integrating the platform with real-time alerts from a number of public cloud monitoring systems. In short, we have a broad set of capabilities and features that we wish to deliver up until the close of 2021.
For those that may not have seen, we have been publishing a series of “show and tells” for the last few months. These explain a lot about the OpRes product. Whilst they are also useful in helping users get to grips with the toolset and reporting frameworks we have built. You can find these posted below for your perusal:
Onboarding in OpRes - Create Your Operational Resilience Framework in Minutes
OpRes Show & Tell 2 - Introducing The Operational Resilience Hub
OpRes Show & Tell 4: Important Business Services in Financial Service
OpRes Show & Tell 5: Operational Resilience Scoring Framework for Financial Services
Before I close out, I wanted to say a massive thank you to those of you who spared me your time, insights and direction in the early days of OpRes. It was a lonely experience embarking on this little passion project at times and I am grateful for all the support and candid feedback you provided!
Thanks for reading as ever! We look forward to hearing your feedback about the alpha release and sharing further announcements with you in the months ahead.
All the best,
Ben
