Case study – Financial Services
A regulated Swiss bank, running in the public cloud.
When AWS opened its Zurich region, a FINMA-regulated crypto bank could finally keep its data in Switzerland and move off a managed-hosting provider it had outgrown. 56k.Cloud migrated its full application landscape to AWS – landing zone, private banking connectivity, and a live B2B crypto product – in under two years.
The problem
The bank's applications ran on a managed-hosting provider it had outgrown: a slow release cycle, a deployment process coupled to several third parties, and fixed infrastructure it couldn't scale or optimise. As a fast-moving crypto business it needed to build on modern cloud technology – which the incumbent couldn't offer – while staying inside a highly regulated Swiss banking environment.
- FINMA-regulated: data residency in Switzerland was non-negotiable
- Keep the core banking platform where it was; migrate everything around it
- Private, dedicated connectivity to partner banks and nothing over the open internet
- CISO sign-off on security, audit, and encryption before anything went live
The solution
A governed, multi-account landing zone written in Terraform to AWS best practices, spanning the Zurich region (data residency for Swiss workloads) and a second region for resilience. Applications were rehosted from the provider's managed OpenShift onto native AWS (EKS), and the legacy cluster decommissioned. Private connectivity runs over dual AWS Direct Connect links via a Transit Gateway hub, with PrivateLink for peer-to-peer access; the B2B crypto-trading service sits behind a network load balancer on a redundant two-AZ cluster, exposing FIX interfaces to partner institutions. GuardDuty and AWS audit controls address the bank's CISO requirements.
The migration ran under the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), co-funded by AWS and delivered "Power of 3": 56k.Cloud engineers alongside AWS Professional Services and the bank's own cloud team.
The outcome
Full outcomes available under the anonymized reference on request.
- Full application landscape migrated to AWS in under two years.
- A live B2B crypto product launched for FinTech partners on the Zurich region.
- Legacy platform shut down early, saving ~6 months of runtime and associated costs.
- Private FIX connectivity to partner banks over dedicated Direct Connect links.
- Faster releases and quicker turnaround onboarding new banking partners.
- A cloud foundation the bank's 80+ developers own and can hire against.
It runs in production today. Built with the bank's team and handed over for them to own and run, with us on call for as long as they want.