NFE Capability Pillars | Testhouse
$5.4B
in Fortune 500 losses from a single vendor update outage in 2024
Crowdstrike Outage Analysis 2024
70%
of outages now cost over $100K — up from just 39% in 2019
Uptime Institute 2023
$2.2M
median hourly outage cost for banking and financial services — 16% above the cross-industry average
New Relic FSI 2024
increase in outages taking over 48 hours to recover from since 2017
Uptime Institute 2023

Systems That Fail Gracefully. Or Don't Fail at All.

We deliberately break your systems in controlled conditions — before the real world does it for you. The outcome is validated availability, proven recovery, and business continuity you can quantify and commit to your customers and regulators.


What's at Risk Without It
$5.4B
$5.4B in losses across Fortune 500 from a single vendor update outage in 2024 — a resilience failure, not a software failure
$100K
Proportion of single outages costing over $100K has grown from 39% to 70% between 2019 and 2023 (Uptime Institute)
$2.2M
Banking and financial services suffer median outage costs of $2.2M per hour — 16% above the cross-industry average (New Relic FSI 2024)
Outages taking more than 48 hours to recover from have increased 4× since 2017 — DR strategies are outpaced by system complexity
What We Deliver

Chaos Engineering

Structured, hypothesis-driven failure injection — following the Netflix Simian Army model — to systematically expose every failure mode in your systems before customers do. GameDays built around your business-critical journeys.

High Availability

Verify your HA design actually delivers the "nines" you've promised — testing failover paths, load balancer behaviour, database replication lag, and active-active/passive configurations under real conditions.

Failover

Validate RTO and RPO commitments under realistic failure scenarios — not theoretical. Know your actual recovery time, not your planned one. Identify the gap between design intent and operational reality.

Disaster Recovery (DR) Baselining

End-to-end DR testing that validates your runbooks work in practice, your backup integrity is sound, and your recovery sequencing meets regulatory requirements. Regulators audit DR evidence — we create it.

Business Outcomes We Deliver
99%
System availability achieved

Four-nines reliability validated through chaos engineering and HA architecture testing — the availability standard that 90% of enterprises now require.

75%
Reduction in unplanned outage incidents

Proactive failure injection identifies and fixes failure modes before they manifest as customer-impacting incidents.

10×
Faster failover and recovery

Tested, optimised runbooks and automated recovery sequences reduce recovery time from hours to minutes — validated in advance, not discovered under pressure.

£M
Regulatory penalty risk eliminated

Evidenced DR testing and availability proof satisfies FCA, PRA, DORA, and other regulatory resilience requirements — avoiding fines and enforcement action.

Client Outcome — Insurance

National Insurer Achieves 99.99% Availability and Eliminates Regulatory Risk

Unplanned outages during claims processing peaks were creating regulatory scrutiny and damaging customer trust. Our resilience team introduced structured chaos engineering — running GameDays that revealed 12 previously unknown single points of failure across the claims platform. DR runbooks were rewritten and automated, cutting recovery time from 4 hours to 22 minutes.

Read the full case study
NFE Maturity Model — Where Does Your Organisation Sit?
Maturity Level Performance Reliability Security Observability Business Risk
Level 1 — Reactive Ad-hoc testing before release No DR testing Annual pen test only Siloed server monitoring High — incidents discovered by customers
Level 2 — Defined Load tests in staging DR plan exists, untested SAST in pipeline APM on key apps Moderate — issues caught late, costly to fix
Level 3 — Proactive Perf gates in CI/CD Chaos experiments quarterly SAST + DAST in pipeline Full-stack observability Low — issues caught early, rapidly resolved
Level 4 — Continuous Real-time CX + capacity AI Continuous chaos + SLO error budgets Security as code, always-on VAPT AI-powered anomaly prediction Minimal — revenue-protective, regulation-ready

Common Questions About Reliability and Resilience

Answers to the questions we hear most often from engineering, operations, and technology leaders.

We have a DR plan in place. Why do we need to test it?
A DR plan that hasn't been tested is a hypothesis, not an assurance. In practice, runbooks become stale, system dependencies change, and recovery sequencing that looked correct on paper fails under real conditions. We test your actual RTO and RPO against realistic failure scenarios, so you know your recovery time before a regulator or an outage does.
What is chaos engineering and won't it break our production systems?
Chaos engineering is structured, hypothesis-driven failure injection carried out in controlled conditions. It's typically done against non-production environments first, then progressively in production where it's safe to do so. We follow the same model pioneered by Netflix: every experiment has a defined scope, blast radius, and abort condition. The goal is to find failure modes before your customers or a real incident does.
How do you help us achieve the "nines" of availability our SLAs require?
We validate that your high availability architecture delivers what it promises - testing failover paths, load balancer behaviour, database replication lag, and active-active/passive configurations under real conditions. We then identify the gaps between your design intent and operational reality and help you close them before they become incidents.
Can you help us satisfy regulatory resilience requirements such as DORA or FCA?
Absolutely. Evidenced DR testing is increasingly mandatory across financial services regulation — DORA, FCA, and PRA all require demonstrable resilience, not just documented plans. We produce the audit-ready evidence packs - test reports, recovery records, runbook validation logs - that satisfy regulatory scrutiny and eliminate enforcement risk.
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NFE Capability Pillars

Find Out Which Pillar Deserves Your Attention First

Our free NFE Maturity Assessment takes less than 2 weeks and gives you a clear, prioritised view of your non-functional risk exposure — and a roadmap to address it.