Cloudhouse unveils drift audit to bolster bank resilience
Cloudhouse has launched a Drift Detection Audit service focused on identifying untracked IT configuration changes across technology estates, as UK financial services organisations face scrutiny over resilience.
The company linked the launch to disruption in the sector. Nine major banks and building societies recorded 33 days of unplanned downtime over the past two years, according to figures cited by Cloudhouse.
Cloudhouse also published findings from its State of Technical Debt Report. The survey covered Risk and Compliance Managers, IT leaders and CIOs across financial services, government, and manufacturing. It found that 70% of organisations regularly experience configuration drift.
Configuration drift refers to changes that occur in systems over time, outside formal change control. Cloudhouse said this can create operational and regulatory risk when organisations cannot evidence what changed, where it changed, and whether it was authorised.
Service details
Cloudhouse said the Drift Detection Audit combines its monitoring and compatibility technologies. The company positioned the service as a way for organisations to get a consolidated view of an estate in real time.
The Drift Detection Audit uses Guardian, which Cloudhouse describes as its configuration-monitoring tool. The Audit assesses configuration state at a cadence set by the organisation. It surfaces drift and unauthorised changes, and it produces what the company called audit-ready evidence.
Cloudhouse said the approach changes how teams respond to configuration issues. It framed drift as a contributor to outages, compliance failures and technical debt.
Alongside the Audit, Cloudhouse introduced Guardian Test Drive. The company described this as a time-limited, full-featured instance of the Guardian tooling. Cloudhouse said this gives teams visibility of drift and dependencies in their own environments before a purchase decision.
Compatibility platform
Cloudhouse also highlighted Alchemy, a compatibility platform that it said strengthens drift detection across complex estates. Cloudhouse said Alchemy enables outdated applications to run unchanged on fully supported operating systems.
The company linked that approach to legacy risk. It pointed to critical applications that remain tied to unsupported platforms. It also cited dependencies between systems that can increase the risk associated with routine changes.
Cloudhouse said Alchemy is deployed in regulated sectors. It reported 76,954 users, 1,794 applications modernised, and 78.5 million successful application runs over 10 years.
Market context
Operational resilience remains a live issue for banks and other regulated firms as they manage ageing technology stacks, increasing change volumes, and heightened scrutiny from regulators. Cloudhouse's launch places a focus on evidence of control and on the ability to demonstrate what changed in production environments.
The company said organisations face a "widening control gap" between expectations and what many teams can show in practice. It linked that gap to audit pressure and to the challenge of proving stability at estate level.
"Most major outages don't start with dramatic failure. They start quietly - a drifted configuration, an untracked change, a patch applied outside the process. When organisations can't see what's changing across their estate, resilience becomes guesswork and risk becomes invisible. Drift Detection is designed to close that gap by making operational risk visible, provable and actionable, so change doesn't escalate into a business incident," said Mat Clothier, Chief Executive Officer, Cloudhouse.
Cloudhouse said organisations can access a free Drift Detection Audit to assess configuration drift, legacy exposure and transformation challenges across their environments.
The company was founded in 2010. It sells three products: Alchemy, Foundry and Guardian. It counts GE Healthcare, National Australia Bank and HM Government among the organisations it works with.