Resilient Banking with AWS Cloud Migration

Business challenge

Our client offers a wide range of conventional and innovative banking services through its nationwide network used by more than 2.5 million customers.

While addressing technology as a benchmark for successful digital transformation, they needed a highly resilient, available, and flexible banking solutions ecosystem. They have diverse business applications that cover all the business needs of a universal bank. These applications used on-premise infrastructure, which is, within the industry context, considered a high-risk for BCP (Business Continuity Plan) combined with complex tasks associated with Disaster Recovery Planning. This infrastructure created a barrier that our client had to overcome to become a successful digital bank with zero downtime and 24/7 service provision to their customers.

The technology partnership with Intellias was aimed at supporting the client’s meticulous business continuity strategy: modernizing their infrastructure and developing secure digital products while empowering them to streamline tech- and infrastructure-related processes and focus on their business instead.

This called for a thorough assessment of the multiple banking cloud migration options, then designing target infrastructure, as well as defining a transformation roadmap for infrastructure and application projects. Finally, the actual migration of their on-premise application to the AWS-corporate infrastructure was to be conducted with automation and DevOps toolsets along with the best practices for DevOps in banking – all to minimize the risks of AWS migration. In parallel, the client has been planning numerous business transformation projects with the aim of building new 24/7 applications for service provision.

Technology solution

In close cooperation with the client’s teams, the Intellias experts evaluated the existing product portfolio and on-premise infrastructure and defined the best-fitting technologies to prepare applications and infrastructure for banking cloud migration as strategic activities. The client opted for AWS as the platform of choice with proven computing and storage capabilities available for enterprises looking to take advantage of everything the cloud has to offer.

With a particular focus on the benefits of AWS cloud migration in banking, our specialists helped to augment and strengthen the client’s existing DevOps activities and built an IT layer. It helped to implement meticulous planning strategies with cross-discipline realignment. Further, we moved on to providing business and technology consulting and developing sophisticated architecture and infrastructure for our client’s payment system.

Applying AWS DevOps practices for DevOps AWS migration made it possible to optimize the collaboration between development and operations teams and effectively utilize advanced technologies and practices. This led to the launch of a robust and capable product that complies with the latest industry standards.

Due to geopolitical factors, the client’s applications had to be migrated on a reduced timeline to both minimize the risks associated with the disaster recovery plan quickly and satisfy ‘business as usual’ expectations.

Intellias experts assisted with the end-to-end design and hassle-free banking cloud migration of the on-premise online applications to AWS infrastructure based on ‘lift and shift’. Where applicable, optimizing migrated workloads to use AWS cloud-native services was carried out, involving a minimal-risk approach to yield maximum ROI, which completely met our client’s requirements for availability and resiliency.

While building banking on the AWS cloud and migrating applications, it was critically important to secure low latency and reliability of the applications’ deployment and scaling in the cloud within a rapid timeline. Therefore, an “Infrastructure as Code” approach was selected with the following preferred IaC toolset: Terraform, Terragrunt and Atlantis. Also, some additional third-party tools were used: PaloAlto FW, CloudFlare, GitHub Enterprise, and Dynatrace.

After the code implementation was completed, a range of automated processes was applied, which included testing infrastructure, deployment strategy, infrastructure automation as well as its monitoring and scaling.

Business impact

As our client’s business is growing and transforming into a digitally driven Banking-as-a- Service company, Intellias continues to support the bank technologically and strategically by implementing cloud migration in banking to future-proof their services and business resilience strategies.

• Employing comprehensive AWS DevOps services allowed the creation of a collaborative environment between software development, IT functions and business, thus fueling faster time to market for our client.
• The organic application of DevOps in banking led to a greater flexibility in optimization and continuous improvement, a better security posture as well as decreased operational burdens, and reduced IT budgets.
• Online banking solutions were migrated to AWS virtual private cloud in 2.5 months contributing to business continuity and data security.