Cloud-Based Database Hosting for Standard Bank on AWS

Company: Standard Bank
Industry: Financial Services
Company Size: 50 000+ Employees

About the Company

Standard Bank is one of South Africa’s largest financial services organisations, serving millions of customers across the African continent. With a history spanning over 160 years, the bank offers a comprehensive range of banking and financial products, from personal and business banking to wealth management and investment services. Standard Bank is committed to leveraging innovation and digital transformation to deliver secure, user-friendly, and scalable solutions that meet the evolving needs of its customers in an increasingly connected world.

The Challenge

Standard Bank sought a scalable, secure, and cost-efficient solution to host their business-critical databases. Their existing on-premises infrastructure lacked the agility needed to support growing data demands and ensure high availability across regions. Additionally, the bank aimed to modernize their technology stack, align with cloud-first strategies, and reduce the overhead associated with hardware maintenance, disaster recovery planning, and manual backups. A key driver was the need for a reliable cloud provider with strong security and compliance frameworks to meet internal governance and financial services regulatory requirements.

Our Solution

We architected and deployed a secure and optimized AWS cloud infrastructure to host Standard Bank’s critical SQL databases using Amazon EC2 instances. The project involved designing the environment to meet performance, security, and availability requirements.

Key components of the solution included:

Amazon EC2 for compute, hosting the SQL Server workloads.
AWS IAM and Security Groups for access control and hardened security.

The implementation ensures future scalability, high availability, and adherence to compliance standards.

Benefits to the client

The migration to AWS provided Standard Bank with a number of measurable and strategic benefits:
- Improved operational efficiency through automation and centralized monitoring.
- Reduced infrastructure costs by moving away from costly on-premises hardware and optimizing compute resources based on actual usage.
- Increased reliability and uptime, meeting the bank’s high-availability expectations.
- Enhanced security and governance, aligned with financial services regulatory frameworks.
- Faster time-to-market for future development and deployment activities, enabled by a DevOps-aligned foundation.
This successful deployment not only met the immediate hosting needs but also laid the foundation for broader cloud adoption within the organization.

Technologies and Methodologies Used

Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon EC2 Windows
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

By migrating its business-critical databases to AWS, Standard Bank modernized its infrastructure, reducing reliance on costly and inflexible on-premises systems. The solution delivered improved security, scalability, and availability while ensuring compliance with financial services regulations. With AWS as the foundation, Standard Bank now benefits from lower operational costs, centralized monitoring, and a future-ready platform that accelerates digital transformation and supports broader cloud adoption across the organization.

Services

Do you have any questions or queries?

We can help you grow your business

Consultants

0 +

Driven by a commitment to client satisfaction, collaboration, and cutting-edge solutions.

Years Experience

0 +

Delivering excellence through decades of expertise, innovation, and trusted solutions.