A decade of zero major outages for a $3 trillion financial institution
Client: a major international financial institution managing over $3 trillion in assets.
Engagement: managed operations for business-critical database applications, running for more than ten years.
Headline outcome: zero major outages and 24/7/365 availability across the entire engagement.
The situation: a vendor that couldn't meet the bar
The institution's previous vendor was unable to meet the strict uptime and documentation requirements its business-critical database applications demanded. In regulated finance, documentation is not paperwork; it is the audit trail that lets a system exist at all. A provider that restores service but cannot evidence how, why, and under what controls is a compliance liability wearing an SLA.
This is worth pausing on, because it mirrors what most companies actually experience before switching providers: not a catastrophic outage, but a slow accumulation of unmet requirements:
- tickets without root cause analyses,
- restores without evidence,
- reports that describe activity rather than accountability.
The approach: replace the model, not just the vendor
Maxima deployed a dedicated support team across its international hubs, providing constant oversight and proactive management for the institution's most essential database infrastructure. The operating principles behind that sentence are the ones we now describe as our standard model:
Follow-the-sun, genuinely.
Incidents hand off between awake teams with full context. In ten years, no incident has waited for a time zone to wake up.
Documentation as an output, not an afterthought.
Every change, incident, and restore test produces the evidence trail a regulated institution requires. The requirement that broke the previous vendor became a design input.
Proactive over reactive.
Capacity, performance, and upgrade planning run on a schedule, so the system's future is managed with the same discipline as its present. The absence of drama over a decade is not luck; it is the accumulated result of failure classes removed one at a time, before most of them ever paged anyone.
The outcome, and why "boring" is the point
More than ten years of business-critical operation. Zero major outages. Perfect 24/7/365 availability. To size what that is worth, the ITIC 2024 study puts hourly downtime above $300,000 for over 90% of mid-size and large enterprises; a decade of avoided major outages for a $3 trillion institution is a very large number left uninvoiced.
When prospects ask what heroics produced that record, the honest answer is: none, and that is the record's actual content. Heroics are what an operating model produces when it fails; a decade without them is what it produces when it works.
What this engagement says if you are evaluating providers
Three transferable lessons.
First, uptime numbers are outputs of an operating model; interrogate the model, not the number.
Second, documentation requirements are a genuine differentiator between providers; ask to see evidence artifacts, not descriptions of them.
Third, longevity is the metric no provider can fake: ask any candidate provider for their longest continuously running engagement and what its incident history looks like.
Maxima Consulting is a managed cloud operator and engineering partner for software vendors and enterprises, operating for global financial institutions and complex industries since 1993.
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