Can Your Critical IT Operations Survive CPS 230’s ‘Severe but Plausible’ Scenarios?

Struggling with APRA CPS 230? Get practical insights on asset discovery, risk monitoring, and third-party governance to meet resilience requirements.

In Australia, APRA’s CPS 230 Operational Risk Management standard came into force on 1 July 2025, replacing five existing outsourcing and business continuity standards and representing a fundamental shift toward real operational resilience for Australian financial institutions. It pulls outsourcing, business continuity, and operational risk into one simple question: Can your critical operations survive severe but plausible disruption?

That includes outages in your IT environment, problems with service providers, and unplanned changes to infrastructure. For those of us responsible for keeping systems running, CPS 230 means better visibility, stronger service provider governance, and faster response when things go wrong.

While this article focuses on APRA’s CPS 230, similar operational resilience requirements are emerging globally – from the UK’s PRA operational resilience rules to the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). The same foundational principles of asset visibility, automated response, and service provider oversight apply regardless of your regulatory framework.

What this means in practice

Know what you have and its health

You can’t manage what you can’t see.

CPS 230 expects a clear picture of your IT capability and asset health.

Open-AudIT automatically discovers and inventories every device on your network – servers, workstations, and network gear – so you know what’s out there, how it is configured, and how old it is.

Combined with OpConfig, you can track changes and baseline configurations, spotting unauthorized or unexpected updates before they cause downtime.

Stronger service provider oversight

Many environments rely on outsourced IT teams, third-party integrators, or managed service providers. CPS 230 requires a clear understanding of who accesses what systems and establishes recovery processes when service providers face challenges. The standard’s emphasis on “Enhanced Third-Party Risk Management” makes robust service provider oversight a core requirement.

With OpCharts, you can create service provider portals – letting external teams monitor and manage only the devices and infrastructure you authorize. This gives you vendor transparency while keeping control of your environment, supporting the contractual obligations CPS 230 expects.

Operational risk monitoring and rapid response

Detecting problems early and knowing how to respond is critical to resilience. As highlighted in KPMG’s analysis of CPS 230, the standard “underpins CPS 220 Risk Management” and requires organizations to demonstrate they can maintain critical operations under stress.

OpEvents and the OpHA Message Bus provide real time event handling, alerting you to issues as they happen and triggering automated workflows. Virtual operators can even take first line remediation steps, from restarting services to applying known fixes, before humans get involved.

Incident readiness and automated recovery

CPS 230 asks: What happens if a critical system fails? Can you get back up within tolerance? The combination of OpEvents for detection and OpConfig for rapid rollback or configuration redeployment means you’re ready to restore services fast. Automatic reporting and audit trails make post incident reviews easier and give your board the evidence it needs for APRA reporting.

Extending resilience with network and security controls

While asset visibility and automated remediation form the foundation, CPS 230 also calls for preventive and continuity controls across core IT services. This aligns with the standard’s integration with CPS 234 Information Security requirements, where cyber resilience becomes a compliance imperative.

This is where FirstWave’s wider security suite comes in:

Secure Traffic Manager provides load balancing, failover, and secure application delivery, ensuring critical business services stay online even under load or infrastructure disruption.

CyberCision Email Security keeps communications resilient by blocking malicious and unwanted email threats that can disrupt business operations or trigger incidents.

CyberCision Web and Firewall Security protects critical systems and data from external attacks, ensuring network integrity and supporting continuous, secure service delivery.

These solutions address the standard’s emphasis on incident prevention, rapid response, and operational continuity, especially in scenarios involving third parties or cloud-hosted services.

Getting started

Complete visibility enables effective security and management. Discovering and baselining your environment provides the foundation for CPS 230 resilience.

Download Open-AudIT and start identifying every device connected to your network. From there, you can build baselines, strengthen vendor oversight, and layer in monitoring, automation, and security – everything you need to meet CPS 230 requirements and build confidence in your operational resilience.