Cloud migration for financial services, with the evidence built in
Financial institutions do not get to move first and document later. Residency, key custody, retention, and recovery objectives are all decided in the design phase, because that is what the examination will ask about.
What changes here
Cloud Solutions in finance is not the same engagement
Key custody decided, not defaulted
Provider-managed, customer-managed, or hardware-backed keys chosen deliberately per data class, with rotation and separation of duties written down.
Retention that cannot be quietly altered
Where records must be preserved in non-rewritable form, object lock and legal hold are configured as part of the landing zone rather than added after an audit finding.
Recovery objectives tied to the business day
RTO and RPO set against settlement windows and market hours rather than against a generic target, then proved by rehearsed restores.
What the regime actually requires
Outsourcing to a cloud provider does not outsource accountability. Regulators expect the same control and evidence you would hold in your own data centre, plus a documented exit path.
- Non-rewritable, non-erasable retention where SEC Rule 17a-4 applies
- GLBA safeguards over customer financial information, including vendor access review
- Documented concentration risk and an exit plan, in the spirit of regulator outsourcing guidance
- PCI DSS scope kept deliberately small where card data is in play
The work itself
Full cloud solutions pageAssessment, landing zone, and target architecture
An inventory of what you run, a dependency map, and a landing zone with accounts, networking, identity, and guardrails set up before the first workload moves.
Migration and modernization in waves
Applications moved in dependency order — rehost where it earns nothing to change, re-architect to managed services and containers where it pays for itself.
Cloud-native application development
Serverless and container workloads, managed databases, queues, and event-driven services built for the platform rather than ported onto it.
FinOps and cost optimization
Tagging, budgets and alerts, rightsizing, savings plans, and idle-resource cleanup — spend attributed to a team and a service, reviewed monthly.
Resilience, backup, and tested recovery
Multi-AZ design, backup policy, and restores actually rehearsed against an agreed RTO and RPO instead of assumed.
Observability and cloud security posture
Metrics, logs, and traces in one place, with IAM least privilege, encryption, and posture checks running continuously rather than at audit time.
Finance questions we get asked
Something more specific? Send us the situation and we’ll answer it straight.