Migrating critical financial services infrastructure to the cloud requires meticulous planning, security considerations, and zero tolerance for downtime. Here's how we executed a flawless migration that exceeded all expectations.
The Challenge
Our client, a financial services firm processing 50,000+ daily transactions, needed to migrate from on-premise infrastructure to AWS while maintaining:
- 100% uptime during business hours
- SOC 2 Type II compliance
- Sub-100ms API response times
- Complete audit trails for all transactions
- Real-time data synchronization
Migration Strategy
Phase 1: Assessment & Planning (4 weeks)
- Complete infrastructure audit and dependency mapping
- AWS architecture design with multi-AZ redundancy
- Security and compliance framework setup
- Disaster recovery and rollback procedures
Phase 2: Parallel Infrastructure (6 weeks)
- Set up AWS environment with IaC (Terraform)
- Configure VPCs, subnets, and security groups
- Implement real-time data replication
- Load testing and performance validation
Phase 3: Gradual Cutover (8 weeks)
- Route 10% of traffic to AWS for validation
- Incremental traffic increase (10% → 25% → 50% → 100%)
- Continuous monitoring and performance tuning
- Decommission on-premise infrastructure
Results
- ✓ Zero downtime: 100% uptime maintained throughout migration
- ✓ 60% cost reduction: From $180K/year to $72K/year in infrastructure costs
- ✓ 3x performance improvement: API response times dropped from 250ms to 85ms
- ✓ 99.99% availability: Exceeding previous 99.5% SLA
- ✓ Scalability: Can now handle 10x traffic without infrastructure changes