PEXA boosts property exchange resilience with AWS tech

PEXA has cut the time it would need to recover its Australian digital property exchange after a major disruption to less than four hours, following a targeted upgrade of its core platform with Amazon Web Services.

The company said recent testing showed that a full recovery of data and platform services for the PEXA Exchange would complete within that timeframe in a serious outage scenario. The benchmark covers incidents such as the impact of a faulty software deployment or a cyber event affecting the exchange.

PEXA runs the main digital property settlement and lodgement system in Australia. It is classed as national critical infrastructure because of its central role in property transactions.

The new milestone follows a wider platform enhancement programme. The programme focuses on stability, security and operational resilience across the group's technology stack.

Multi-region recovery

The improved recovery time relies on a multi-region disaster recovery design on AWS infrastructure in Sydney and Melbourne. The design spreads core workloads across two separate geographic regions.

PEXA has also put an always-on "pilot light" deployment in place. This deployment maintains continuous platform availability and near real-time replication of production data into the secondary region.

The pilot light approach keeps a minimal version of the environment running at all times. Engineers can scale this environment up quickly during a disruption.

PEXA Chief Executive Officer and Group Managing Director Russell Cohen said enhanced resilience is central to the organisation's role in the property market.

"We are laser-focused on improving stability, security and resilience across our ecosystem, and these latest results with AWS underpin this commitment. All of data and platform recovery within four hours is a significant achievement and ensures resilience and continuity for millions of property transactions nationwide," said Russell Cohen, Chief Executive Officer and Group Managing Director, PEXA.

Cohen said the new disaster recovery window would avoid a shift back to paper-based fallbacks if the exchange experienced a major outage.

"What this means is that should a major disruption occur, our customers won't need to revert to outdated and slow alternatives including manual processes and rewriting transactions from scratch. We believe proudly that PEXA is effectively the best defence for eConveyancing redundancy," said Cohen.

He said the uplift builds on the platform's existing operating record. "The Exchange already has a proven track record of performance uptime and reliability, and we can now provide Australians with even greater certainty that their property exchange infrastructure remains robust, secure and future-ready," said Cohen.

AI-assisted upgrades

PEXA also used AWS's generative AI tools as part of the wider technology programme. The company's engineers used Amazon Q Developer to carry out upgrades to legacy Java environments and to automate technical documentation across multiple services.

The AI tooling supported changes to more than 60 services. PEXA said this work advanced its long-term strategy to improve resilience, scalability and security across its platform.

Engineers completed certain legacy Java upgrades in three hours with the assistance of the AI tool. The upgrades form part of a broader cloud and technology modernisation effort inside the group.

PEXA has integrated a generative AI assistant into its engineering workflows. The company said this has changed how its developer and engineering teams approach problem solving and new feature delivery.

The assistant now supports day-to-day tasks such as code analysis, troubleshooting and drafting technical artefacts. PEXA said this has shortened timeframes for introducing platform enhancements for its customers.

AWS perspective

AWS said the project reflects a wider focus among financial services firms on resilience and legacy modernisation. The cloud provider is working with banks, payments firms and market infrastructure operators on similar initiatives.

AWS Australia and New Zealand Director for Financial Services Jamie Simon said digital infrastructure operators are increasing their scrutiny of recovery architectures and code bases.

"The resilience of Australia's national critical infrastructure is paramount, and we applaud PEXA's continued commitment and investment to its high resilience standards for its property exchange platform," said Jamie Simon, Director for Financial Services, AWS Australia and New Zealand.

"We're proud to see PEXA's multi-Region disaster recovery strategy across AWS's Sydney and Melbourne Regions has helped enhance the platform's recovery time. By also leveraging Amazon Q Developer's agentic AI code transformation capabilities, PEXA has reduced potential operational risks often hidden in legacy systems while saving time and money," said Simon.

"We're seeing financial service organisations focus on legacy system modernisation to strike an important balance between security and resilience, against the organisation's ability to accelerate its innovation. This type of transformation is a critical prerequisite for financial stability, especially for core systems that are vital to Australia's economy, and that's why we're seeing many of our local and global financial service customers leveraging the power of generative and agentic AI to achieve these goals," said Simon.

Security posture

PEXA said the platform upgrade has also lifted its wider enterprise security posture. The programme embedded stronger vulnerability management processes and tighter identity and access controls across the environment.

The group has adopted secure-by-design delivery practices as part of the uplift. It has also implemented measures around data security, lifecycle management, observability and threat detection.

Business continuity readiness is a further focus. The organisation has run regular tests of its disaster recovery setup and response processes alongside the technical changes.

PEXA operates the country's largest electronic lodgement network and reports more than 20 million property settlements since launch. The company also runs data and insights businesses including .id (Informed Decisions) and Value Australia, and has expanded its exchange operations into the UK.

The company said it will continue its cloud and technology modernisation programme as regulators and customers increase expectations of critical infrastructure resilience.