Estate assessment
An inventory of databases, versions, sizes and dependencies, with the applications each one supports.
Industry context
Database solutions in financial services
We design and migrate database platforms so transaction systems stay available and recoverable, with every move tested before it happens in production.
Database work covers the engines that hold your transaction data: high availability, backup and recovery, performance and migration between platforms. We assess the current estate, design the target topology and move workloads in planned windows with a tested rollback.
Financial institutions work under close central bank supervision, with fraud exposure and customers who expect money to move instantly. Risk, compliance and operations teams need to see how each change affects controls before it goes live, so we involve them from design onwards. Data residency rules often decide where a database may run and where its backups may go, such as data classification policies for government and regulated data in the UAE and the NCA Cloud Cybersecurity Controls in Saudi Arabia.
We hand over with runbooks and training, and can stay on under agreed service levels.
Alongside sector regulation, we often map delivery evidence to cross-industry baselines such as the UAE Information Assurance Regulation issued by TDRA, the NCA Essential Cybersecurity Controls in Saudi Arabia and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, which many risk reviewers already use.
What the work covers
We design, deliver and stay until operation is stable, with evidence your procurement and risk teams can rely on.
Availability and recovery
Replication, backup and restore designed against agreed recovery targets, and tested by restoring real data.
Migration and tuning
Schema and data migration rehearsed on a copy of production, followed by query and index tuning under realistic load.
Regulatory landscape
We map delivery evidence to the expectations of the regulator you answer to: the Central Bank of the UAE or, for capital market firms, the Securities and Commodities Authority; in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA), including its Cyber Security Framework, or the Capital Market Authority.
Security and encryption
Encryption at rest and in transit, key management and access reviews for administrators.
Operations handover
Monitoring, patching and restore runbooks handed to your database team with training.
Signs you are ready to start
A database programme is ready to start when the applications on each database and their recovery needs are known.
- A risk or compliance sponsor has agreed to review the design before build starts.
- Application owners have agreed the recovery targets and maintenance windows for each database.
- Security and compliance have agreed where data and backups may be hosted.
Plan database solutions in financial services
Share your current systems, compliance themes and timeline. We will return a phased plan, a staffing model and a risk register for your stakeholders to review.