Not all downtime is created equal. In the financial sector, downtime can be crippling—it disrupts transactions, damages reputations, and costs millions in lost revenue. Folks in charge of security for financial institutions operate in an extremely high-pressure environment. Here, every millisecond matters, and even the smallest disruption can create cascading consequences.
This leads to an unappetizing choice for financial DevOps teams who sometimes have to decide between security best practices and uninterrupted uptime. Implementing security updates often requires system downtime, leading to immediate, tangible losses. On the other hand, delaying updates leaves systems vulnerable to cyberattacks, which can result in far greater damage.
Accepting concrete losses to bolster a security program against a hypothetical risk isn’t easy. But delaying security updates and patches can lead to much larger losses down the road. Security teams need a way to keep their security configurations up to date with the evolving threat landscape without the losses associated with downtime. Let’s dig into the dichotomy between uptime and security and explore how financial DevOps teams can overcome this challenge.
The Cost of Downtime
The average large enterprise hemorrages about $23,750 per minute of unplanned IT downtime. This is the average, but financial services deal with a lot more money changing hands per minute than other industries. That, combined with stricter regulations, suggests this number is a conservative estimate within the finance space.
The costs aren’t limited to lost revenue. In fact, it is estimated that only about a quarter of the $152 million financial services companies lose annually to downtime is direct revenue loss. The rest is made up of costs associated with data corruption, regulatory fines, legal fees, reputational damage, and remediation expenses. In high-frequency trading environments, even a few milliseconds of downtime can lead to lost market opportunities, costing firms millions. A single downtime event can also create cascading failures in dependent systems, compounding the impact across an entire organization.
Beyond financial loss, downtime often results in violations of regulatory requirements. Compliance standards like PCI DSS, SOX, and GDPR require continuous system availability and strong security controls. Financial institutions that fail to meet these requirements risk severe penalties and lawsuits.
Customer trust is equally fragile. A study by PwC found that 88% of consumers are less likely to return to a business after a poor experience. If a financial service is unavailable—even temporarily—customers often take their business elsewhere.
Delaying Patching to Avoid Downtime
However, attackers actively search for unpatched vulnerabilities, and financial institutions are among their top targets. Delaying security patches, even for the sake of uptime, can be catastrophic.
When the Log4j vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) was disclosed, thousands of organizations rushed to apply patches. But financial firms hesitated—patching meant potential downtime during peak trading hours. The delay resulted in a feeding frenzy for attackers. One report noted that in the first 10 days after the vulnerability was announced, 25 thousand websites were hit with a total of 103 million exploit attempts per hour.
Another great example is the infamous Equifax breach back in 2017, where attackers exploited a vulnerability in the Apache Struts framework (CVE-2017-5638). This vulnerability was publicly disclosed and patched by Apache on March 7, 2017.
The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Government Reform conducted an investigation into this breach after the fact. Their report highlighted that Equifax’s Global Threat and Vulnerability Management team had disseminated information about the critical Apache Struts vulnerability internally on March 9, 2017, instructing that the patch be applied within 48 hours. However, the patch was not implemented in a timely manner, leaving systems exposed. Attackers began exploiting the unpatched vulnerability on May 13, 2017, leading to unauthorized access to sensitive information of approximately 143 million U.S. consumers.
Both of these situations could have been significantly mitigated with timely patching. But traditional security updates require downtime. These companies hoped to avoid both the downtime and the consequences of delayed patching, but it was a gamble that—for most—did not pay off.
Waratek’s Secret Weapon: Zero Downtime Security for Java Applications
Traditional patching modifies source code, requiring restarts and deployment downtime. This forces financial institutions into a no-win situation: prioritize uptime and risk exposure, or prioritize security and disrupt operations.
Waratek’s Java security platform is powered by software-defined runtime application self-protection (RASP) that operates at the runtime level to shutdown attacks before they can begin, bypassing the need to manually patch—or even know about—a vulnerability altogether.
Waratek’s virtual patching applies security updates at runtime, without modifying underlying code. This allows security teams to script and enforce security policies dynamically. These policies detect and block exploits instantly, preventing SQL injection, deserialization attacks, and memory-based threats in real-time without impacting performance. Here’s what that means for you:
Integration with CI/CD Pipelines: Financial firms rely on continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows to roll out new features and updates efficiently. However, traditional security updates require manual intervention, creating bottlenecks. Waratek’s runtime security model operates dynamically within existing DevOps environments, allowing security policies to be updated instantly.
Automated Security Policy Enforcement: Waratek enables security policies to be scripted, version-controlled, and enforced automatically. This eliminates human error, ensures consistency, and allows security updates to be deployed without downtime.
Reducing Mean Time to Remediation (MTTR): The time between identifying a security threat and mitigating it is critical. Traditional patching can take weeks or months due to testing and deployment challenges. Waratek reduces this to minutes, allowing firms to respond to emerging threats faster and ensuring vulnerabilities never remain exposed long enough to be exploited.
Ready to Transform Your Security Strategy?
For financial DevOps teams, the tension between security and uptime is an ever-present challenge. Every second of downtime can mean millions in lost transactions, regulatory penalties, and irreparable damage to customer trust. Yet delaying security updates to preserve uptime has proven to be an equally risky gamble, as history has repeatedly shown.
The good news is that financial institutions no longer have to choose between the two. Waratek’s runtime security solutions provide a zero-downtime approach to application security, eliminating the need for disruptive patching cycles while ensuring continuous protection against emerging threats. Waratek enables financial firms to stay ahead of vulnerabilities without taking systems offline, keeping transactions flowing and security airtight.
Ready to see how Waratek can transform your approach to security? Take a tour today and learn how you can eliminate downtime risks without compromising protection.
