Overview

The bank is a leading financial institution that must provide secure and reliable digital banking services. Mobile and online usage keep growing. Regulation keeps getting tighter. The bank wanted a cloud operations model that gives clear visibility into digital services, strong guardrails, and fast incident response.

B8 ICT Solutions designed and implemented this model on AWS. The goal is simple. Keep payments and wallet journeys healthy. Reduce operational risk. Make change safe and auditable. Give the bank a platform that can grow without losing control.

Key Challenges

The payments and wallet platform faced several operational challenges:

1. The team did not have a single place to see the health of critical journeys such as login, wallet top-up, transfer, and bill payment. Signals were spread across many tools, making it hard to know if a problem was in the app, the platform, or an external integration.
2. Incidents depended on manual investigation and ad-hoc recovery steps. Time to detect and time to resolve priority incidents were longer than acceptable for a regulated digital channel.
3. Patching and configuration of servers, containers, and databases were not driven by one standard process. Proving compliance during audits required extra effort and manual evidence collection.
4. There was no clear multi-account story for governance. Policies such as region limits, encryption, and access control were handled at the account or team level rather than through central guardrails.
5. Cloud spend was not tied cleanly to products and environments. Leaders wanted better visibility into which services drove cost so they could plan budgets and make tradeoffs with confidence.

Key Results

After the cloud operations model was in place the bank and B8 ICT Solutions started to track a simple set of metrics that describe how well operations are working. Examples include

1. Time to detect and time to resolve for priority one and priority two incidents on the wallet and payments journeys
2. Availability for key digital flows such as sign in, wallet top up, and payment during both normal days and peak events
3. Patch coverage for production and non production fleets within an agreed time window
4. Counts of open high and medium findings from AWS Config and AWS Security Hub and how quickly they are addressed
5. Monthly cloud spend by product and environment and the gap between forecast and actual

The bank now uses these metrics in steering meetings, in incident reviews, and in quarterly planning. They show a clear improvement compared with the period before this model. The exact values can be shared with AWS reviewers as supporting evidence.

Solution

To meet these needs, B8 ICT Solutions implemented a CloudOps architecture on AWS:

With these pieces working together, the bank has a platform where engineers and operators can see what is happening, act in a calm and repeatable way, and prove to auditors and leaders that the service is under control even as usage grows.

Key technologies in this digital banking application include -

• Amazon CloudWatch : Unified metrics, logs, dashboards, and alarms to track service health and uphold SLOs.
• AWS CloudTrail : Tamper-evident record of API activity across regions for change tracking and investigations.
• AWS Config : Ongoing configuration checks and drift detection against defined policies.
• AWS Systems Manager (SSM) : Patch automation, runbooks, remote commands, and parameter management for fleet operations.
• AWS Security Hub : Central view of security posture mapped to CIS and AWS best practices.
• Amazon GuardDuty : Always-on threat detection from account, network, and workload signals.
• Amazon Inspector : Automated vulnerability assessments for EC2 and container images.
• AWS Backup : Policy-driven, centralized backups and restores to meet compliance.
• Amazon EventBridge : Event routing to kick off notifications, workflows, and auto-remediation.
• AWS Lambda : Serverless functions for alert handling and remediation steps.
• AWS Budgets : Cost thresholds with alerts to control monthly spend and variance.
• AWS Cost Explorer & Cost Categories : Analyze spend and allocate costs by app or environment.
• AWS IAM Access Analyzer : Reviews sharing policies to prevent unintended access.
• AWS Organizations & SCPs : Multi-account governance with preventive guardrails at the org level.

Benefits

With this cloud operations model the bank has a payments and wallet platform that is stable, auditable, and ready to grow.

Financial

The bank can see where cloud spend comes from and which services drive cost. Budgets and cost reports give leaders a clear picture at month end. This supports better planning and more confident investment decisions.

Operational

Incidents follow a calm and repeatable process. On call staff have the right information and tools. Changes move through pipelines that are traceable and reversible. Governance and security checks run in the background, not as a last minute scramble.

Performance and reliability

Teams watch customer journeys on shared dashboards. They see latency, error rate, and availability in real time. Capacity planning and autoscaling use real traffic data, so peak events are handled with less risk to the customer experience.

Conclusion

By adopting a cloud operations approach on AWS the bank and B8 ICT Solutions built a secure, compliant, and highly available digital payments platform on Amazon EKS. The model brings together observability, disciplined operations, strong governance, and cost awareness. It gives the bank a clear view of service health, reduces operational risk, and supports rapid but controlled change across its digital channels.