Enabling Financial-Grade Platforms through
Strategic Cloud Modernisation

About the Client

SupportSages partnered with a leading product-based development company, building and maintaining platforms for banking and financial clients, to deliver DevOps as a Service (DaaS). Through strategic cloud modernisation, Kubernetes optimisation, and end-to-end automation, the organisation achieved a 70% reduction in infrastructure costs while meeting strict financial-grade security and compliance requirements.

The Challenges

The client struggled with performance slowdowns and security gaps as their RAG chatbot scaled across multiple platforms.
Their existing GCP setup couldn t efficiently handle 500+ concurrent users, leading to latency and reliability issues.

Escalating Cloud Costs

Multiple client environments (Dev, UAT, Production) running on non-optimised infrastructure led to high operational spend.

Strict Security & Compliance Expectations

Financial clients required continuous PCI DSS compliance, regular audits, and strong security controls

Limited Deployment Agility

Multiple client environments (Dev, UAT, Production) running on non-optimised infrastructure led to high operational spend.

Scalability Constraints

High-volume transactional data and Kubernetes workloads demanded better resource management.

SupportSages’ Solution

SupportSages delivered a fully managed DevOps operating model, enabling the development company to meet enterprise financial standards while controlling cost and complexity.

Kubernetes Modernisation & Cost Optimisation

Migrated workloads from Amazon ECS to Amazon EKS, enabling improved scalability and standardisation. Monitoring and alert response.
Performed deep Kubernetes pod resource analysis, reducing CPU and memory requests
Optimised node sizing and node count, significantly lowering cluster infrastructure costs.
Selectively migrated Kubernetes environments from AWS to OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) for non production and specific workloads to further reduce Kubernetes operating costs.

CI/CD Transformation with Governance

Replaced AWS CodePipeline entirely with Jenkins, offering greater control and reduced tooling costs.
Implemented GitOps-based deployments using ArgoCD, ensuring environment consistency and auditability.
Introduced Jira-driven deployment workflows:

Distinct approval processes for Development, UAT, and Production
Full traceability of changes for financial-grade governance

Enforced manual approval gates for production deployments.
Integrated SonarQube static code analysis to maintain code quality and security standards.

Open Source Observability & Monitoring Stack

To support multiple client environments cost-effectively, SupportSages designed a scalable open-source monitoring platform:

Fluent Bit logging for Kubernetes, replacing CloudWatch to significantly reduce log ingestion costs
ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) for centralised log analysis
Prometheus & Grafana for performance and metrics monitoring
Wazuh for security monitoring and compliance visibility
Zabbix and Uptime monitoring for infrastructure availability
ClamAV for malware detection

Security-First Architecture for Financial Workloads

Implemented Cloudflare WAF for DDoS protection and application-layer security.
Enabled continuous threat detection using:

AWS GuardDuty
AWS Inspector
Wazuh SIEM

Enforced manual approval gates for production deployments.

Data & Storage Cost Optimisation

To support multiple client environments cost-effectively, SupportSages designed a scalable open-source monitoring platform:

Migrated high-volume MS SQL developer workloads from Amazon RDS to a dedicated database server, reducing costs while maintaining performance
Converted all EC2 EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3, improving performance at a lower cost.
Centralised backup strategy:

All AMI backups stored in Amazon S3
Long-term retention moved to S3 Glacier

Applied CloudWatch log retention policies to eliminate unnecessary storage overhead.onverted all EC2 EBS volumes from gp2 to gp3, improving performance at a lower cost.
Implemented Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering for efficient data lifecycle management.

Continuous PCI DSS Compliance Enablement

As part of DevOps as a Service, SupportSages helped the development company maintain continuous PCI DSS readiness for its financial clients:

Quarterly PCI DSS audits and remediation cycles
Proactive vulnera bility fixes and configuration hardening
Annual PC I DSS certification renewal, including:

Documentation preparation
Evidence collection
Audit support

Compliance controls integrated directly into CI/CD and infrastructure workflows

Business Impact!

70% Reduction in Cloud Infrastructure Costs

Achieved through Kubernetes optimisation, open-source tooling, cloud migration strategies, and storage optimisation.

Financial-Grade Reliability

Automated health checks, instant rollbacks, and GitOps deployments ensure stable releases for banking clients.

Stronger Security & Compliance Posture

Continuous monitoring and audit-ready processes reduced regulatory risk.

Operational Excellence at Scale

Jira-driven deployments and DevOps governance enabled faster delivery across multiple financial customer environments

This engagement enabled a development company to deliver secure, compliant, and cost efficient platforms for the banking and financial sector, without being burdened by infrastructure complexity.

By adopting DevOps as a Service from SupportSages, the organisation transformed its cloud operations into a scalable, audit ready, and cost optimised foundation allowing engineering teams to focus on building high value financial products.

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Enabling Financial-Grade Platforms through Strategic Cloud Modernisation