In some boardrooms, “open source” still triggers an ideological debate. In a regulated financial institution, that is the wrong lens. The real question is how you diversify risk, avoid excessive lock‑in, and retain control over where your data lives and how it is protected.

For many institutions, “Microsoft” is not a vendor; it is oxygen. Identity, mail, collaboration, document management, endpoint management, even parts of core banking integration all flow through that ecosystem. Which is precisely why you should run the scenario nobody wants to think about: what if you had to exit, partially or fully?

Most Business Continuity Plans look reassuring—until you start asking uncomfortable questions that require evidence rather than good intentions. If you are responsible for resilience in a regulated institution, try this short interrogation.

Walk through any Luxembourg bank and you will see the same logos again and again: Microsoft 365, Teams, Azure‑hosted services, US‑based ticketing and CRM platforms. Individually, each choice was rational. Collectively, they form a concentration risk that is both operational and legal.

If you strip away the legal phrasing, CSSF expectations on business continuity are brutally simple. They want to see that you understand what really matters, how quickly it must be restored, and how you will do it in practice. Especially when ICT and third‑party services are in trouble.

When regulators talk about operational resilience, most banks still picture floods, data‑centre failures, or a nasty ransomware outbreak. Yet the next “severe disruption” for a Luxembourg institution could just as easily come from a judgment in Luxembourg (Court of Justice), Washington, or Brussels rather than from a hacker in a hoodie.

Schrems II is often treated as a “data protection” story, but for EU financial institutions it is really a live-fire test of operational resilience. One court judgment wiped out Privacy Shield overnight and forced banks and PSFs to scramble through SCCs, DPAs, and vendor contracts just to keep core services legal. That is not a legal nuance; that is a production incident with a geopolitical root cause.

From Compliance to Continuity: Engineering Digital Sovereignty with an Open Source Backup Stack

The “hey, can you help me real quick?” culture undermines enterprise security by bypassing verified support processes. This informal DM approach to IT requests creates exploitable gaps exploited by social engineers. fastpasscorp

There is nothing more frustrating than building a beautiful flow or a sleek backend, only to have a Large Language Model (LLM) decide that today is the day it wants to be a “poet” instead of a data processor.

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