In the financial sector, resilience isn’t optional. Recent cloud outages have shown us exactly how fast critical data can disappear.
The risk is amplified by major regulatory drivers like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which mandates that financial institutions are ready for any disruption. The recent designation of Google Cloud as a Critical Third-Party Service Provider (CTPP) under DORA further underscores this strong commitment to enabling secure and resilient financial operations for our customers.
Consider a major bank, with many critical apps processing thousands of transactions daily. For them, a critical incident means more than just downtime; it means regulatory fines and an erosion of client trust.
The problem: Traditional tabletop exercises fail in two key ways:
They rely on generic scenarios that do not reflect the complexity and unique weaknesses of the institution’s actual production environment.
They often involve only IT or Compliance teams, failing to capture the cross-functional collaboration essential for real-world incident response.
In this blog, we’ll share a solution using context-aware scenario modeling on Gemini Enterprise.
Google Cloud’s Technical Account Management (TAM) team has pioneered a new approach to operational resilience testing that moves beyond textbook scenarios.
Our innovation is making these exercises dynamic and truly context-aware. Our team dives deep, ingesting and analyzing the customer’s actual operational information from different sources to build deeply customized, realistic scenarios. We look at everything from past support cases and meeting minutes to the application’s architecture and even billing metrics and SLAs.
Then, we use Gemini Enterprise to design a bespoke scenario, complete with a step-by-step timeline of exactly what should fail and when, plus the mitigation checks needed. Context-aware AI preparation can help FSI customers test their resilience against situations rooted directly in their own production environment, supporting their response strategy is fit for purpose.
To illustrate the realistic, evolving scenario designed by Gemini Enterprise, here is a high-level snapshot of a simulated incident. Note – the metrics are for illustrative purposes only.
| Time (hh:mm) | Phase / Action | Customized context-aware event |
| T + 0:00 | Initial anomaly | A spike in latency is detected on a critical transactional processing service. Logs show unusual API calls. |
| T + 0:15 | Escalation / Discovery | Application operations reports that the primary customer database is showing a 150% increase in read errors. |
| T + 0:45 | Critical impact | The App team confirms the errors are due to data corruption in a critical region. Regulatory alert issued. |
| T + 1:15 | Remediation attempt | An Incident Manager attempts to execute the standard failover runbook, but the attempt fails due to a known, outdated configuration issue. |
| T + 2:00 | Crisis point | Internal communication systems become slow due to load, forcing the team to use alternative means of communication (Testing communications protocol). |
The simulated incident progression, from a specific service anomaly to a regulatory crisis point, is deeply informed by the customer’s actual environment and documented weaknesses, making the exercise intensely relevant.
In a recent simulation with a major FSI customer, this approach uncovered a dual critical incident involving massive latency and data corruption — a perfect stress test for their core systems.
The result was a real-time, interactive emergency drill that brought together the full spectrum of business decision makers. The diversity of participants was key to exposing gaps across technology, process, and communication.
The cross-functional simulation strategy led to a high-fidelity discussion, helping the customer uncover blind spots and refine its emergency response strategy in a safe, yet realistic, setting.
We’ve successfully executed this AI-driven approach with large FSI customers across the DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) region, and the impact has been immediate and measurable:
Practical steps: The exercise highlighted organizational strengths (e.g., cross-functional communication) and led directly to high-priority initiatives (e.g., implementing specific automated failover runbooks). Crucially, nearly all suggestions were quickly implemented because they were grounded in a real production-like scenario.
A shift in strategy: The realism was so impactful that many customers are now actively looking into integrating AI-based threat modeling into their existing compliance processes.
A lasting partnership: The AI-powered tabletop program, high-value service is now scheduled as a regular exercise with the Technical Account Managers, solidifying Google Cloud Consulting as a strategic collaborator in the customer’s operational resilience journey.
Interested in moving beyond generic disaster drills and truly validating your organization’s resilience?
Reach out to your Google TAM today to learn how our AI-powered tabletop exercises can validate your readiness.
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