Cloudhouse today announced the launch of its Drift Detection Audit, a new visibility and configuration-stability service designed to dramatically speed up the detection of configuration issues across complex IT estates.
Addressing Rising Operational Risk in Complex IT Estates
The launch comes amid growing operational risk in the UK financial sector, with nine major banks and building societies recording 33 days of unplanned downtime over the past two years. This is a clear signal that resilience can no longer be treated as a systems issue. In financial services, outages quickly become customer-impacting business incidents, and the root cause is often the same: change occurring inside complex estates without consistent visibility or proof of control.
On top of this, Cloudhouse’s State of Technical Debt Report – a survey of Risk and Compliance Managers, IT leaders and CIOs across financial services, government, and manufacturing – revealed that 70% of organisations regularly experience configuration drift. The findings point to a widening control gap. Organisations are expected to prove stability and compliance, yet many cannot confidently evidence what has changed, where it changed, and whether it was authorised – leaving drift as a silent driver of operational and regulatory risk.
Making Configuration Drift Visible, Provable, and Actionable
To help tackle these challenges, the Drift Detection Audit brings together Cloudhouse’s established monitoring and compatibility technologies to give organisations a real-time, consolidated view of their estate. Powered by Guardian, Cloudhouse’s configuration-monitoring tool, the Audit continuously assesses configuration state at a cadence defined by the organisation, surfacing drift and unauthorised changes with audit-ready evidence. This enables IT teams to move beyond reactive firefighting and establish ongoing operational control – reducing the likelihood of outages, compliance failures and escalating technical debt.
To help organisations move from awareness to action, Cloudhouse is also introducing Guardian Test Drive alongside the service. This provides a time-limited, full-featured instance of the Guardian tooling, enabling teams to see their own environment’s drift and dependencies in action before making a purchasing decision.
Strengthening Resilience Through Compatibility and Control
Drift Detection is further strengthened by Alchemy, Cloudhouse’s compatibility platform that enables outdated applications to run unchanged on fully supported operating systems. This helps organisations reduce one of the most persistent drivers of operational fragility: critical applications tied to unsupported platforms. It also addresses brittle dependencies, where even routine change carries disproportionate risk. Alchemy is already widely deployed across regulated sectors, with 76,954 users, 1,794 applications modernised, and 78.5 million successful application runs in 10 years – demonstrating the maturity and scale underpinning Cloudhouse’s compatibility capabilities.
Mat Clothier, CEO at Cloudhouse, commented: “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.”
Organisations can now access a free Drift Detection Audit here to assess configuration drift, legacy exposure and transformation challenges across their environments.