Cloud Infrastructure Migration

Cloud migrations in the financial services sector carry enormous risk. Any downtime on core systems directly impacts revenue and client trust. Regulatory compliance (FCA guidelines) required all data to remain within UK AWS regions. The legacy systems included a mix of Windows Server 2008 applications, Oracle databases, and custom-built middleware - many of which had no documentation and some that had not been touched in years.

The client's internal IT team had no AWS experience, meaning DataVonix needed to not only execute the migration but also upskill the team and establish operational procedures for the new cloud environment.

The migration used a blue-green deployment model. Each application was stood up in AWS in parallel with the on-premise system. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) handled continuous replication of database changes during the transition period. Once the AWS environment was validated and load-tested, traffic was switched over via Route 53 weighted routing - starting at 10% and increasing to 100% over 48 hours. The old systems remained on standby for 14 days post-cutover before decommissioning.

The target AWS architecture was designed with security and resilience as first principles. All resources are deployed across two Availability Zones in eu-west-2 (London). A multi-layer network design uses VPCs with public, private application, and private data subnets. Internet-facing load balancers sit in the public subnet; application servers are in the private application subnet with no public IP addresses; databases are in the private data subnet, accessible only from the application layer.

AWS WAF protects all public endpoints. AWS Shield Standard provides DDoS protection. CloudTrail logs all API activity. AWS Config monitors infrastructure compliance. GuardDuty provides threat detection. All secrets (database passwords, API keys) are managed in AWS Secrets Manager with automatic rotation.

The on-premise environment was costing approximately $28,000 per month in hardware maintenance, data centre colocation, and staffing. The AWS environment was architected for cost efficiency from the start: EC2 Reserved Instances (1-year) for predictable workloads, Spot Instances for batch processing jobs, S3 Intelligent-Tiering for archive data, and AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations implemented from day one. Total monthly AWS spend: $11,200 - a 60% reduction.

DataVonix delivered a tailored AWS training programme for the client's 4-person IT team covering: AWS core services, the AWS Well-Architected Framework, CloudWatch monitoring and alerting, incident response procedures, and cost management. All four team members achieved AWS Cloud Practitioner certification within two months of migration completion.