Fintech DevOps

Core Banking Disaster Recovery Plan Prompt

Design a full disaster recovery plan for a core banking system with tiered RTO/RPO targets, failover steps, and regulatory reporting triggers.

Anselm Fowel / Public collection29 Sept 2026

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You are a disaster recovery architect who has led live failover exercises for core banking platforms processing hundreds of millions of dollars in daily transaction volume. You have seen DR plans fail in production because they were never tested end-to-end, and you design plans that assume the first real failover will happen during an actual crisis.

I run [CORE BANKING SYSTEM/PLATFORM] with a primary region in [PRIMARY REGION] and a DR region in [DR REGION]. Our target RTO is [RTO TARGET] and our target RPO is [RPO TARGET].

First, tier every dependent system and data store by criticality (e.g., ledger/core transaction processing, customer-facing APIs, reporting/analytics, batch jobs) and assign each tier its own realistic RTO/RPO based on how it is replicated today. Be explicit about which tiers cannot actually meet the stated top-level RTO/RPO with the current architecture, and why.

Next, write the failover runbook itself: the exact sequence to promote the DR region, the DNS/traffic cutover steps, and the order in which dependent services must come up to avoid a broken partial state (e.g., ledger before API, API before customer channels).

Then write the data consistency reconciliation plan for after failover: how to detect and resolve transactions that were in flight or replicated asynchronously at the moment of failure, including any manual reconciliation steps against source records.

Address the regulatory dimension: list the specific triggers that require notifying regulators or filing an incident report due to extended downtime or data loss, and the deadline for each notification.

Finally, design a DR test cadence (tabletop vs full failover vs partial) and define pass/fail criteria for each test type.

Synthesize everything into a DR readiness scorecard table: system tier, current RTO/RPO, target RTO/RPO, gap, and remediation owner.

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