Financial Services Firm Reduces Costs and Risk with AWS Migration and Ongoing Management
A mid-sized financial services firm turned to TierPoint for AWS migration and managed services to reduce IT overhead while ensuring compliance and scalability.
Introduction
A mid-sized financial services company specializing in payment processing faced increasing demands for security, compliance, and performance while serving small and medium-sized businesses across the U.S.
Operating in a highly regulated industry, they needed to ensure their IT infrastructure could support growth, maintain reliability, and meet stringent security requirements. As their business expanded, they began evaluating ways to optimize their technology environment, not only through cloud migration, but also with ongoing management and governance.
They turned to TierPoint to help them migrate their infrastructure to AWS and provide continuous management of their cloud environment, ensuring long-term compliance, performance optimization, and operational efficiency.
Challenges
As the financial services company grew, so did the complexity and cost of managing their IT infrastructure. Their small internal IT team was increasingly burdened with maintaining uptime, applying security patches, and ensuring compliance across their environment. They needed a solution that could scale efficiently while meeting the high security and regulatory standards required for processing financial transactions.
Their existing environment was becoming costly and resource-intensive to maintain, prompting the need for both a modern cloud platform and expert ongoing management. In addition to reducing infrastructure costs, they sought to offload day-to-day operational tasks, such as monitoring, backup management, and compliance enforcement, without compromising performance or reliability.
They also required a secure, compliant, and seamless way to integrate with their existing authentication and storage systems, all while minimizing disruption to daily operations.
Solution
Migration to AWS
To address their infrastructure and scalability challenges, the finance firm collaborated with TierPoint on a cloud migration strategy aligned with AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices. TierPoint began with a thorough assessment of their existing environment, identifying opportunities to optimize workloads, enhance security, and improve operational efficiency.
The migration was executed in phases to minimize disruption and ensure a smooth, seamless transition. TierPoint leveraged key AWS services to deliver a secure, scalable, and compliant architecture:
- AWS Application Migration Service: Simplified assessment and migration of Windows virtual machines
- Amazon EC2: Provided scalable, on-demand compute resources for workloads
- Amazon FSx: Delivered cost-effective, high-performance storage for Windows applications
- Amazon Managed Microsoft AD: Integrated seamless authentication with existing systems
- AWS IAM & AWS KMS: Enhanced security through identity management and encryption
- AWS Migration Hub: Centralized tracking and management of the migration process
This phased approach enabled the finance firm to modernize its IT infrastructure while maintaining compliance with industry regulations and minimizing disruption to its operations.
Ongoing Management and Optimization
Following the successful migration, TierPoint implemented a comprehensive managed services program tailored to their AWS environment. With limited internal IT resources, the company needed a partner to provide continuous oversight, optimization, and support.
TierPoint’s managed AWS services include:
- 24/7 monitoring and incident response using Amazon CloudWatch
- Backup orchestration and disaster recovery powered by AWS Backup
- Patch management and OS hardening for Amazon EC2 instances
- Compliance tracking and auditing using AWS Config
- Identity and access governance through AWS IAM policy management
- Cost and performance optimization driven by insights from AWS Trusted Advisor and TierPoint’s FinOps team
With TierPoint handling the day-to-day management of its AWS environment, the finance firm has significantly reduced operational overhead while ensuring security, compliance, and business continuity. The flexible, resilient infrastructure is now fully aligned with the organization’s long-term growth and modernization goals.
Results
The company successfully migrated from its colocation environment to AWS on schedule, achieving significant gains in cost efficiency, performance, security, and scalability. With TierPoint managing their environment post-migration, they eliminated legacy system overhead and now benefit from continuous optimization, compliance support, and 24/7 monitoring.
Key AWS services like Amazon FSx and right-sized EC2 instances helped optimize resource use and reduce costs, while Amazon Managed AD enabled seamless integration with existing authentication systems, without disrupting workflows.
Key Benefits
- Business Continuity: A phased migration approach ensured minimal operational disruption, allowing for testing and validation throughout the process.
- Cost Optimization: Right-sizing and TierPoint’s ongoing management, including monitoring and cloud spend insights, have helped proactively control costs and align usage with business goals.
- Security and Compliance: AWS-native tools paired with TierPoint’s managed services simplified regulatory compliance, offloaded security tasks from internal staff, and strengthened the company’s overall security posture.
With a modern, managed AWS environment in place, the company is well-positioned to scale efficiently, stay compliant, and deliver secure, high-performance financial services to its customers.
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