Liquid Web You’ve reached a familiar point. It’s no longer a single system causing friction. Multiple tools, platforms, and integrations are starting to stretch your teams. Customer-facing apps, vendor pilot programs, analytics dashboards, security tooling–all of them mission-critical, all raising the same questions:
- Where should this live?
- Who owns it?
- How do we defend it if something goes wrong?
These aren’t one-off questions anymore. They’re recurring. And when the same questions keep surfacing across different systems, it’s a signal: your infrastructure approach needs to match the reality of how systems actually behave. Non-core systems are a recurring challenge–and recognizing the pattern is the first step toward managing it.
Not all systems are created equal
Core platforms exist for a reason. They protect the ledger, enforce consistency, and move slowly by design. That conservatism is a strength. It’s why core systems are trusted by regulators, boards, and customers alike.
But here’s the truth: not every system fits inside those boundaries.
Think about some of the systems running across your institution today:
- Public websites and mobile onboarding tools
- Vendor integrations
- Marketing campaign platforms
- Analytics dashboards
- Fraud detection and reporting systems
All of these systems are visible to customers, regulators, and leadership. All of them are mission-critical in ways that the core platform wasn’t designed to handle. And yet, many institutions still reach for the same default answer: “If it’s important, put it in the core.”
That instinct makes sense–it feels accountable and defensible. But it’s increasingly misaligned with how systems behave today. And what feels safe in theory can quietly introduce the exact risks institutions are trying to avoid: unpredictable performance, unclear accountability, and incidents that are harder to explain.
When core placement quietly creates risk
The problem isn’t that these systems exist. It’s how they’re managed.
Forcing non-core systems into the core often slows delivery, adds friction, and hides risk rather than reducing it. Manual workarounds creep in. Dependencies become tangled. And when something goes wrong, tracing accountability becomes a scramble.
Put simply: stacking everything into the core increases systemic risk. When systems share infrastructure and resources, performance becomes unpredictable, failures ripple further, and accountability gets murky. Recovery is slower, and explaining incidents to leadership or examiners shifts from facts to educated guesses.
Conversely, the visibility and control you need under scrutiny–clear ownership, predictable behavior, documented isolation–becomes harder to demonstrate when everything is tangled together.
Focus on behavior, not labels
One of the biggest missteps teams can make is anchoring decisions to labels rather than to behavior. Core vs. non-core feels tidy, but it’s not the whole story. What really matters is how a system behaves:
- Does it change frequently?
- Does it experience uneven traffic or spikes?
- Does it rely on external vendors or third-party services?
- Could a failure create reputational or regulatory exposure?
- Will examiners or auditors need to understand how this specific system operates (independently from everything else)?
Take a digital onboarding tool, for example. It doesn’t touch the ledger, but during a product launch, it’s under heavy load, visible to customers, and linked to fraud detection workflows. Placing it in the core might feel safe, but it could slow updates, make recovery paths slower, and blur ownership. The right placement is determined by behavior and risk, not by a classification label. And the right environment is one where you can answer questions with certainty: how it performs under load, who’s accountable when issues arise, and how it’s isolated from other systems.
A shared mental model for non-core systems
When teams begin recognizing patterns, they need a language to talk about them. Without it, conversations stall, risk gets oversimplified, and decisions feel arbitrary. A simple framework I recommend focuses on four things:
- Placement is intentional: Systems live where they can fail safely, recover predictably, and be clearly explained under scrutiny, with dedicated resources that eliminate shared risk.
- Ownership is clear: Every system has an accountable owner and documented responsibilities.
- Risk is visible: Regulatory, reputational, and operational risk is mapped and managed – and you have the documentation and visibility to prove it.
- Behavior drives architecture: Frequent updates, traffic spikes, and vendor dependencies guide placement more than labels or tradition.
This isn’t theoretical. When teams adopt this shared model, and can explain why a system lives where it does, how it behaves under pressure, and who’s accountable, decisions stop creating follow-up questions across boards, leadership, and auditors.
Introducing Specialty Cloud
At this stage, some teams find it helpful to adopt a mental model called Specialty Cloud–not as a product, but as a way to think about non-core, mission-critical systems in regulated environments.
Specialty Cloud is:
- Non-core, mission-critical workloads: Systems that are important, visible, and high-impact, but don’t belong inside the core.
- Infrastructure that complements the core: Supporting innovation and operations without overloading or compromising the core platform.
- Purpose-built, isolated environments: Dedicated infrastructure designed to contain risk, deliver consistent performance without resource contention, and provide the control and visibility institutions need to meet regulatory expectations.
- Examiner-visible systems outside the core: Systems that can be explained, audited, and defended without relying on “core” status for credibility.
- Infrastructure you can fully explain: Systems with documented architecture, clear responsibility models, and audit-ready evidence.
Thinking about systems this way helps your team talk openly, align internally, and make infrastructure decisions that hold up–operationally, regulatorily, and at the board level–without creating new risks or uncertainty.
Why this matters
At this stage, recognition is everything. Teams that stop seeing each system as an isolated problem begin to see patterns. They realize:
- Non-core doesn’t mean optional or low-risk.
- Placement should match system behavior, not just importance.
- Clear ownership and controls are more defensible than defaulting everything to the core.
- Dedicated, isolated infrastructure that provides the clarity and predictability that shared environments can’t.
It’s not about avoiding the core. It’s about choosing the right home for each system.
The takeaway
Multiple systems outside the core aren’t a failure–they’re a signal. A signal that your institution has reached a point where infrastructure decisions need to be intentional, repeatable, defensible, and aligned to how systems actually behave.
Recognizing patterns, understanding system behavior, and using shared language are the steps that make those decisions easier to explain and more resilient.
Specialty Cloud as a mental model helps teams frame those decisions thoughtfully, without disruption, and without introducing new operational complexity or exposure. You can move forward without hesitation while making progress that regulators, auditors, and boards will be comfortable with.