Financial services are one of the essential utilities organizations and governments are supposed to provide to the people. In the wake of becoming digitally advanced economies that offer secure services, implementing financial services in the right manner is imperative. From financial services firms to independent software vendors, there is a host of financial services provided via the cloud.
Today, we are way past the debate on whether the cloud should become a part of the financial industry. Right now, the talk of the hour is how quickly we can integrate cloud technology with financial services. In this article, we will find out how AWS Well-Architected Framework bodes with Financial Services.
Introducing AWS Well-Architectured Financial Services Lens
The core purpose of introducing the AWS Well-Architecture Framework is to understand the pros and cons of your decisions or steps while building services on AWS. While using this system for development purposes, you will learn
- Architectural best practices for designing and developing services.
- Creating a service that operates reliably well for your customers.
- Create secure systems.
- Implement methods and practices to bring cost-efficiency into the system.
While doing so, you will be constantly reminded of the architectural best practices and identify the areas for improvement. Ultimately, implementing the AWS Well-Architected framework for any business solution, including financial, banking, insurance, etc., is to improve the chances of business success.
The AWS structure for the financial services is specifically created to help you architect the solutions while considering the same workload. Using AWS for creating financial services will help ensure that the resultant application is;
- Reliable
- Resilient
- Secure
- Efficient
- Cost-effective
What are the General Principles of AWS Well-Architected Framework?
As the AWS Well-Architected Framework is implemented, it helps developers and designers understand the tenets of a good design in the cloud. These are
- Identify the Capacity Needs: AWS architecture helps you identify capacity needs. Poor capacity decisions mean underutilizing the expensive resources which might be sitting idle. On the other hand, you might be using resources with limited capacity leading to performance implications. AWS cloud computing allows scaling up and down according to the needs.
- Testing Applications at the Production Scale: The AWS cloud environment lets you test solutions at the production scale level. You can create a production test environment on demand to simulate the entire application and identify its performance strengths and weaknesses.
- Automating Low-Cost Architectural Experimentation: With automation, you can implement, create, and replicate workloads to find low-cost systems. This further helps reduce the manual input required to make iterations for finding the best possible implementation system. With this, it becomes convenient to track and log every change, measure the impact, and switch back to the best-fit parameters.
- Build and Implement Evolutionary Architectures: AWS architecture helps build evolutionary architectures. Businesses continue to evolve at an unprecedented rate today. The lack of the requisite architecture to support their evolution restricts them from delivering according to the changing requirements. AWS’ automated implementation and testing environments lower the impact a business faces from these changes. It helps with evolving on demand and ensures continuity in the business.
Businesses should aim for an agile and cost-effective implementation system for every service, including financial services. AWS Well-Architected Framework not only allows for the creation of such a system but also helps businesses perform better than the competition and stay ahead of them in every aspect.
Let’s find out how an AWS-enabled framework can help businesses providing financial, banking, insurance, etc. services.
AWS Well-Architected Framework for Financial Services
The AWS Well-Architected Framework Financial Services Industry Lens is specifically built to satisfy the demands and requirements of businesses in this segment. A few elements influence the design and structure meant for financial services.
- Financial Data: Every financial service is sitting on loads of data. Hence, they need a structure that can help maintain the integrity and security of this data. The structure in question shall have low latency and work with strict requirements for data redistribution.
- Regulation and Compliance: Financial services organizations must comply with numerous regulations and compliances. To this end, using a structural service that helps maintain the user’s data integrity and ensures data encryption and tokenization of the personal data is preferable.
- Open Banking: This refers to the usage of APIs that help share customers’ data with third-party applications securely. With this, banking organizations allow secure access to data, but they need a cost-effective, secure, and scalable system to implement the required functions.
- User Engagement: Financial institutions are increasingly working on improving their engagement with the users as the latter is looking for a better customer experience. In this scenario, using structures that help manage high volumes of real-time data and have the requisite protection standards is essential.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework delivers on these aspects exceptionally well. It further goes ahead by one notch and provides the businesses with the following six pillars.
- Operational Excellence Pillar: This allows businesses to run and monitor their systems to continue to deliver business value. The key is to support the processes and procedures while helping them to improve the same effectively.
- Security: Keeping in mind the importance of security for a financial business, AWS cloud services has the system to protect information and assets. Better security leads to delivering higher business value.
- Reliability: This means that the financial application or service will perform as intended without any hindrances. There are systems to help automatically recover after a failure, scale, and manage the changes arising due to automation.
- Performance Efficiency: This aspect ensures that every system is used to the best of its utilities while ensuring 100% efficiency. It also encompasses using advanced technologies with effect to provide the intended results.
- Cost-Optimization: This helps financial businesses without compromising on the business value at the lowest price point.
- Sustainability: The key here is to build and run a sustainable business. This benefit comes with the capability to hold steadfast and grow even amid environmental, economic, and societal impacts on the business.
Conclusion
The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a one-stop solution for financial services businesses giving them a ready-made platform to perform and flourish. The architecture automatically analyzes the evolving business requirements, provides a security net to operate, and helps deliver services to customers without any hindrance. The financial services industry lens helps build a business that is secure and resilient, ensuring data privacy on all ends.
