Traditional IT is being put under increasing pressure by the business to do more with less, simultaneously driving innovation, growing customer satisfaction, and maintaining system security and compliance—all while increasing scalability, reliability, and uptime. In no other business are these pressures being felt more than in financial services where customer expectations for availability and the security of their data remain extremely high. Recently, a large privately-held regional bank reached out to our cloud migration consultants to ask for help with their cloud adoption. Specifically, they sought help creating a secure cloud foundation for a new customer-facing application.
A central part of the bank’s consumer and commercial digital banking initiative, the new application was designed to take advantage of cloud computing strengths to provide a highly available digital banking experience to customers. However, to meet compliance and security objectives, the new app needed to be quickly deployed to a solid AWS cloud foundation that incorporated operations best practices. In addition, the foundation needed to help the bank meet its security requirements.
Landing Zones AWS
A key goal of the project was to create a solution that would stand the test of time, meeting the bank’s short and long-term cloud needs. Already operating in the cloud, the firm realized it needed a secure cloud foundation that would allow it to achieve three key goals:
- Meet security and compliance objectives
- Effectively start greenfield projects in the cloud and
- Efficiently migrate existing applications to AWS
To meet these objectives, the AWS consulting services team recommended the use of a landing zone.
Our approach was to design a landing zone with a collection of application-agnostic components that provide a secure, manageable foundation for landing applications in AWS. The concept of a landing zone is critical for creating a secure and manageable environment in which applications will operate. For additional reading on How to Get Started with AWS and landing zones, download our paper today.