About the Client

A financial services company offers a comprehensive platform for transaction processing and client management. Their system, managing over half a million clients, streamlines onboarding, retention, and payment processing across various industries. The company specializes in ensuring compliance and operational efficiency for businesses utilizing its platform. The company has become the go-to partner for businesses seeking to optimize their financial operations and client relationships. 

The Challenge

The financial services company’s IT infrastructure, hosted in a traditional data center, utilized a combination of VMware virtual machines and physical servers. This setup led to resource allocation issues, with servers running constantly despite cyclical demand patterns. The static nature of the infrastructure prevented demand-based scaling, resulting in unnecessary costs during off-peak hours and performance challenges during busy periods. 

The company’s primary web application, built on Windows .NET, was experiencing increased strain due to a growing user base. To address these challenges and support future growth, the company decided to migrate to AWS for improved scalability and performance. This migration needed to be completed within a three-month window to align with their SOC 1 compliance audit schedule. Failure to meet this deadline would delay the migration by nine months. Further complicating matters was the requirement to unify disparate systems from their existing data center and non-compliant AWS environments into a single, cohesive solution that adhered to strict compliance standards. This necessitated a comprehensive approach to address both the technical migration and the stringent security and compliance requirements simultaneously. 

The Solution

The migration and modernization strategy began with creating a new AWS organization aligned with AWS landing zone best practices, designed to meet SOC 1 and 2 compliance requirements. A scalable architecture was implemented for the company’s Windows .NET application, deploying it in an Auto Scaling group with custom AMIs. State management was migrated to Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, while file management was moved to Amazon FSx. Logs and metrics were integrated into Datadog to enhance observability. Automated scaling policies were set up to adjust resource utilization based on demand. 

Security measures included the deployment of AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall). Connectivity to the existing data center database was established via AWS Direct Connect. The infrastructure setup was automated using Terraform, allowing for consistent replication in development and testing environments. Throughout the migration, documentation was collected for SOC 1 compliance verification. This approach addressed the immediate scalability and performance needs while also establishing a framework for ongoing compliance and future infrastructure management. 

AWS Services Used

The Results

The AWS migration significantly improved system performance through automatic scaling capabilities, eliminating frequent CPU utilization alarms. Cost optimization was achieved by scaling down during off-peak hours. The enhanced scalability effortlessly accommodated rapid business growth, allowing easy scaling for peak periods without hardware procurement concerns. The company successfully obtained SOC 1 compliance in its new AWS environment and positioned itself for future SOC 2 compliance. This success catalyzed further AWS adoption, including the company’s first disaster recovery test, addressing a critical business continuity gap. The migration enabled faster deployment of new services using native AWS offerings, reducing manual management efforts. This comprehensive solution enhanced overall security and compliance posture, positioning the company for continued growth and resilience while reducing time and risk associated with manual system management.