Cloud-First Banking: Delivering Speed, Security, and Scalability with AWS

The customer is a digital branch-lite bank in MENA that provides banking and digital services to both retail and corporate/SME customers. They strive to create a banking experience characterized by innovation and creativity for their clients and community through the adoption of modern and secure technologies. The bank was looking for a cloud service provider offering a wide range of technology products for the financial sector: secure, cost-effective, elastic, and reliable, with strong Disaster Recovery (DR) and pay-as-you-go pricing.

Challenge

The bank faced several challenges related to deploying its infrastructure and application services in cloud. The number one challenge was implementing the entire technology landscape in the shortest possible time while maintaining flexibility as the bank and its business scales. AWS offered the widest range of products and services that could be adopted by the bank, including technology infrastructure that allowed scalability of workloads, databases, security products, ready-to-use DevOps solutions, and a pay-as-you-use model that suited the bank financially. It also supported legacy operating systems required for the bank’s core banking solution and allowed access from the bank’s locations, where AWS was the only service provider to meet the requirement with the least possible latency. 

For a bank, security is crucial to safeguard data, applications, and related services. The bank was ready to adopt state-of-the-art security architecture that was provided by AWS with partners such as FortiGate and Palo Alto. This complemented the bank’s homegrown security products such as CloudFormation and AWS Config, and integrated seamlessly with the outsourced SOC. Considering the challenges and regulatory requirements in the financial services sector, it was critical for the bank to have redundancy, and AWS’s multiple availability zones would ensure continuous operations in the event of a disaster, with data backups across multiple regions.

Support from the service provider was key to success, as AWS technologies and architecture were new to the bank’s IT team. AWS Support services not only assisted in resolving issues but also suggested improvements. With AWS, the bank minimized the risks of a very high initial investment, long setup times, and the additional resources and training that traditional architecture would have required.

Solution

To address the customer’s challenge of rapid deployment, scalability, and secure infrastructure management, Orion designed and implemented a comprehensive AWS solution that automated the entire application lifecycle. We provisioned the environment using Terraform templates to ensure infrastructure consistency across environments, tagging EC2 resources for automated management. EC2 instances were configured to automatically shut down during non-working hours using CloudFormation stacks, optimizing cost efficiency.

For high availability and resilience, the production database was deployed in a Multi-AZ Amazon RDS configuration, ensuring seamless failover and minimal downtime during maintenance or outages. To further strengthen business continuity, we implemented a DR strategy leveraging cross-region backups and replication, ensuring data durability and compliance with banking regulations.

The application workloads were containerized and deployed on Amazon EKS, with a Cluster node Autoscaler configured to dynamically adjust worker nodes based on workload demand, optimizing performance and resource utilization. Automated CI/CD pipelines were developed using Jenkins & Gitlab configured on AWS EC2, enabling consistent application delivery across environments.

In addition, AWS Backup was configured to automate the backup of critical resources, including RDS, EFS, ECR, and EC2 volumes with defined retention policies. This provided the bank with a robust data protection mechanism, simplifying recovery operations and ensuring compliance with internal and regulatory standards.

Data Migration Strategy

A key component of the project involved securely migrating the bank’s legacy data into the AWS-hosted Temenos environment. To support this, a structured data migration strategy was designed to ensure the accurate and secure transfer of data from legacy systems. It begins with a comprehensive data assessment to identify data quality issues, followed by cleansing, enrichment, and mapping activities. Temenos provides specialized tools like the Data Migration Toolkit and Migration Workbench to automate and streamline these processes. The strategy emphasizes early validation, iterative testing, and reconciliation to ensure data integrity and compliance with regulatory standards throughout the migration lifecycle.

A key aspect of the strategy is its collaborative framework, involving both business and technical stakeholders to align data structures with Temenos’ target architecture. This includes defining clear data ownership, establishing governance protocols, and ensuring that business rules are consistently applied. The migration process is typically executed in waves or mock runs to minimize operational disruption and allow for continuous improvement. Ultimately, the strategy aims to deliver a high-quality, low-risk migration that supports a smooth transition to the Temenos platform and enables faster realization of business value.

Impact

• Reduced initial cost of acquisition of technology and services. The bank began with a billing of approximately USD 10K-30K per month for the first 6-9 months of migration to the cloud, compared to an initial spend of USD 500K for on-premises implementation.
• Enabled autoscaling in resource sizing depending on the need and usage without or with minimal downtime to optimize costs.
• The AWS-based solution resulted in a 65% reduction in infrastructure provisioning time and a lower operational costs through automation and optimized resource utilization. With EC2 instance scheduling and autoscaling in place, the bank achieved significant savings during non-business hours and ensured consistent performance during peak loads.
• Enabled creation of workloads or new services in minutes, compared to hours when in on-prem.
• Eliminated the risk of costly technology refreshes every 4-5 years due to hardware end-of-life or support limitations.
• Gained access to 24/7 AWS support via chat or phone within the agreed SLAs.
• Improved security posture on technology infrastructure with availability of partners to choose from in the marketplace.

Through proactive support and AWS best practices, the bank now benefits from a secure, scalable, and automated cloud environment, enabling faster innovation and enhanced customer experience while maintaining strong governance controls.

Innovate with AWS Cloud

As an AWS Advanced Tier partner, Orion Innovation helps enterprises accelerate modernization, scale securely, and unlock new value with AWS-powered solutions. With over two decades of experience and 200+ trained AWS resources, our team has dedicated over 400,000 hours annually to deploying cloud-native enterprise application modernization and migration initiatives. We have executed large-scale AWS transformations for Fortune 500 customers across telecom, banking, retail, insurance, government, and aviation industries. Learn more about our AWS  solutions.