Critical Hosting Architecture for Financial Planning Software

This platform was financial planning software used by all of the major banks, serving around 20,000 users in total — critical enough that downtime had a direct impact on every one of those institutions, not just a single customer.

The scale problem

The hosting architecture had to hold up against high transaction throughput day to day, absorb sharp peak/burst spikes in demand without degrading, and handle the large volume of data the platform accumulated across its user base — all three at once, rather than any single dimension being the whole story. Designing for one of those in isolation would have been comparatively straightforward; the difficulty was building an architecture resilient enough to handle all three simultaneously, for a platform where every bank depended on the same shared hosting.

Outcome

The result was a high-availability hosting architecture built to keep the platform reliable under real-world load patterns — steady throughput, sudden bursts, and growing data volume together — for a system where an outage would have been felt across the entire Australian banking sector at once.