The Challenge
This regional bank had been running its core banking workloads on ageing on-premise infrastructure for over a decade. While reliable in its early years, the system had become a significant liability: hardware refresh cycles were expensive, capacity planning was imprecise, and any unplanned outage required time-consuming manual intervention by an overstretched IT team.
The bank's leadership recognised that their existing infrastructure was increasingly misaligned with their ambitions — they wanted to launch new digital banking products, onboard fintech integrations, and scale services rapidly in response to customer demand. None of that was feasible without a modern, elastic cloud foundation.
Compounding this was the regulatory dimension: the migration had to maintain strict compliance with RBI guidelines on data residency, security, and audit logging throughout — with zero tolerance for customer data exposure at any stage of the transition.
Our Solution
AdaptNXT executed a phased cloud migration and modernisation programme, purpose-built for the constraints and requirements of a regulated financial institution:
- Cloud Readiness Assessment: Conducted a detailed audit of 80+ applications and workloads to classify them as lift-and-shift candidates, refactor targets, or decommission candidates — establishing a clear, risk-ordered migration roadmap.
- AWS Landing Zone Design: Built a multi-account AWS architecture with dedicated environments for production, staging, and DR — using AWS Control Tower to enforce governance guardrails from day one.
- Security & Compliance Architecture: Implemented a defence-in-depth security model including VPC segmentation, AWS Shield, WAF, CloudTrail audit logging, and encryption at rest and in transit — aligned to RBI cloud security requirements.
- Phased Migration with Zero Downtime: Migrated workloads in iterative waves using AWS Database Migration Service and Application Migration Service, with live traffic cutover during off-peak hours and full rollback plans in place for each phase.
- CI/CD Pipeline Setup: Established automated deployment pipelines using AWS CodePipeline and CodeDeploy, enabling the bank's dev team to ship new features in hours rather than weeks.
- Cost Optimisation from Day One: Implemented auto-scaling groups, Reserved Instance planning, and cost allocation tagging to ensure infrastructure spend scaled with actual usage — not worst-case estimates.
- Team Enablement: Ran structured knowledge-transfer sessions for the bank's internal IT team to ensure they could operate, monitor, and extend the new environment independently after go-live.
The Impact
The migration — completed on schedule and without any security incidents or customer-facing downtime — delivered compounding returns from day one of go-live:
- ~60% reduction in infrastructure costs compared to on-premise, driven by right-sized compute, auto-scaling, and elimination of legacy hardware maintenance contracts.
- Zero unplanned downtime in the 6 months post-migration, compared to an average of 3–4 incidents per quarter on the legacy system.
- New digital product launch time cut from 8 weeks to under 2 weeks, enabling the bank to move at the pace its customers and market demanded.