Case Study: Designing Secure Cloud Infrastructure for a Banking Platform

A regulated digital-banking group in Asia-Pacific asked us to design the cloud foundation for its core platforms. The business wanted the elasticity and managed services of the public cloud; its risk and compliance teams wanted evidence that the new environment would be at least as defensible as the data centre it replaced. Both were right to insist.

The client

A banking and payments group operating under multiple regulators, with an established on-premise estate, a growing product roadmap and an internal IT team stretched across both.

The challenge

New products were being delayed by infrastructure lead times, while auditors were raising questions the legacy estate could not answer cleanly: who can access what, how is data encrypted, how quickly can an environment be rebuilt. Lifting and shifting the old architecture into the cloud would have reproduced the same problems on someone else's hardware.

What we did

• Designed a landing zone on Google Cloud (GCP) infrastructure with strict project and network segmentation between production, non-production and shared services
• Applied least-privilege identity and access management, with break-glass procedures and full audit trails
• Standardised encryption at rest and in transit, with clear key-management ownership
• Made every environment reproducible through infrastructure-as-code, removing hand-built servers entirely
• Built high-availability and disaster-recovery patterns sized to the actual recovery objectives agreed with the business
• Mapped the whole design to the regulator's technology risk expectations before a single workload moved

The outcome

The design passed an independent security architecture review, and the first regulated workloads went live on schedule. Environment provisioning went from weeks of tickets to a repeatable, reviewable process, and the audit conversations changed character: instead of reconstructing answers, the team could point at the code and the logs.