Cockroach Labs, a pioneer and leader in the cloud-native distributed SQL database market with CockroachDB, and PwC UK, a leader in professional services, have announced a strategic collaboration to reduce the risks, costs, and complexity of regulatory compliance and mainframe modernisation.

With this partnership, PwC UK and Cockroach Labs will offer end-to-end comprehensive solutions to banks and financial service institutions grappling with evolving regulatory complexities and impending mandates around operational resiliency, business continuity, and data sovereignty. Additionally, they will address the growing need for financial firms to migrate from legacy mainframes in alignment with modern customer expectations and industry-wide cost optimisation initiatives.

Commenting on this, PwC UK cloud transformation and payments leader, Jon Maskery, said: “Designing for operational resilience is paramount as significant regulatory headwinds underscore the importance of multi-cloud and multi-region platforms.

“We view CockroachDB as more than just another database within a crowded market. It provides our clients with a critical solution to reduce regulatory risks associated with data sovereignty, operational resilience, and cloud transformation.”

Operational Resiliency

EU regulations have elevated operational resiliency to a top-priority for financial firms which emphasises the need for multi-region and multi-cloud platforms. The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) has broadened the focus from guaranteeing financial soundness to also ensuring firms can maintain resilient operations through severe operational disruptions. Even more recently, the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) issued a supervisory statement outlining due diligence for concentration risk on a single supplier, business continuity, and exit strategies.

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Form3, a global payment technology platform and Cockroach Labs customer, chose to leverage CockroachDB to build a scalable, resilient, and advanced multi-cloud infrastructure. The company had to privately network all the clouds together and maintain network connectivity through multiple datacenters.

On this, Form3 head of platfor, Kevin Holditch, said: “The idea of our platform is to be able to survive a cloud vendor outage, so we’re not going to be dependent on any cloud vendor.

“We’re going to have a Kubernetes cluster in each cloud vendor — so Azure, AWS, GCP – and run CockroachDB across the three.”

Data Sovereignty

Compliance with cross-border data transfers remains complex with adequacy arrangements, global privacy rules, and varying approaches taken by regulators. As data sovereignty regulations continue to evolve and expand to more countries and jurisdictions, organisations face the ongoing challenge of adapting their operations to comply with ever-changing requirements. PwC UK helps navigate these ongoing challenges for global firms grappling to become more personalised, customer-centric, and future fit digital banks, avoiding regulatory pitfalls.

Developing the right strategy in this evolving landscape can seem daunting, often requiring a combination of cloud and on-premises database deployments. Consequently, CockroachDB was designed to support data domiciling in multi-region clusters and hybrid environments so global deployments have enough feature flexibility to help comply with various data sovereignty regulations.

Mainframe Modernisation

PwC UK mitigates modernisation risks by identifying the optimal migration strategy, facilitating advanced tooling, and preparing a rollout plan for their business. Together with Cockroach Labs, PwC UK clients can overcome legacy database challenges to reduce operational expenditure, improve business agility, and attract a new generation of talent entering the workforce.

Cockroach Labs head of global partners and ecosystem, Allen Terleto, concluded: “Legacy modernisation initiatives have regained momentum as cost optimisation and unlocking siloed on-premises data for Gen-AI readiness have been elevated to executive boardroom discussions.

“Our strategic collaboration with PwC provides comprehensive business and technology solutions across a broad range of financial services including banks struggling with mainframe modernisation, payment systems mitigating operational resiliency risk, and cross-border fintechs challenged by data sovereignty regulations.”