Financial services firms increasingly run core workloads in the public cloud. The benefits, including elastic capacity, faster releases and modern security tooling, are real. So is the extra scrutiny: regulators, auditors and customers all expect you to prove that control has improved, not weakened.
Before you migrate
- Know your obligations. List the regulations and standards that apply, such as PCI DSS for card data, local data protection law and any outsourcing or operational resilience rules from your regulator.
- Classify your data. Identify what is sensitive, where it may be stored and who may access it.
- Understand shared responsibility. The cloud provider secures the infrastructure; you remain responsible for configuration, identity, data and applications.
- Choose regions deliberately to meet data residency requirements and resilience targets.
Security foundations
- Separate accounts or projects for production, non-production and security tooling.
- Single sign-on, multi-factor authentication and least-privilege roles for every person and service.
- Encryption in transit and at rest, with keys managed in a dedicated key management service and rotated on schedule.
- Centralised, tamper-resistant audit logs kept for your required retention period.
- Infrastructure defined as code and reviewed like application code, so every change is traceable.
Migrating the workload
- Start with a lower-risk service to prove your landing zone, pipelines and controls.
- Decide per application whether to rehost, re-platform or re-architect. Not everything needs rebuilding.
- Plan data migration carefully: validate record counts and balances, and rehearse the cut-over.
- Run old and new systems in parallel where the risk justifies it, and agree on clear rollback criteria.
After go-live
- Continuously scan for misconfigurations and drift from your baseline.
- Test backups and disaster recovery regularly, not just once.
- Keep evidence for audits as you go: architecture records, access reviews and change history.
In regulated environments, documentation is part of the deliverable. If you cannot show it, auditors will assume it did not happen.
With the right foundations, the cloud can make a fintech more secure and more resilient than it was on premises, and far quicker to change.
